Grooving in Pacific Grove

Creative Compositions: Scientist/painter Princess Simpson Rashid, who paints to U2, Dave Matthews and John Legend, equates music to math, which she says is “a beautiful code, like a secret language.” Walter Ryce

Wine, Art&Music event takes a walk on the wild side.

By Walter Ryce

Thursday, May 28, 2009

While Pacific Grove lays claim to many family-friendly events – the Butterfly Parade, Good Old Days and Feast of Lanterns – when the sun goes down and the grown-ups want to make merry, P.G. is reliably an early-to-bedder.

But on special Friday nights, the tide turns in the town’s favor during the aptly named Wine, Art&Music Walk. Anchored to the opening receptions of the 40-year-strong Pacific Grove Art Center, and radiating several blocks around Lighthouse and Forest, the evening event enlists a roster of creative merchants, including The Loft, Trotter and Artisana galleries, to stay open late so that a leisurely flow of guests can check out their art and wares while being serenaded by live musicians, and wined and dined by host venues.

It’s a strolling mixer filled with friends and strangers, colleagues and acquaintances, who meet and bump into each other throughout the night amidst vibrant art and the intoxicating buzz of conversation. It’s expansive enough to uncover new gems, two of which were circuitously stumbled upon by a band of roving journalists at last month’s Wine, Art&Music Walk in the historic 1904 building PGAC occupies – Michael Goodell’s MG Gallery and the studio of artist/printmaker Princess Simpson Rashid. (Yes, “Princess” is her real name.)

Rashid’s will to do art was sparked by her mother, who introduced her to Michelangelo, Raphael and the Renaissance. The self-professed “sci-fi nut” traces her passion for “optics and light and physics” to the time her father took her to see Star Wars.

Rashid graduated from Georgia State University with a B.S. in physics and astronomy, won “five or six” medals in national fencing competitions, graduated from the School of Plastic Arts in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and helped establish an art center in Jacksonville, Fla. Now living in Monterey, she’s already had an auspicious spot at a San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition, landed two shows in Santa Cruz, and made her Monterey County debut at the Jazz Festival’s Art of Music Competitive show at Seaside’s Avery Gallery. (“I was in labor with my second child on opening night,” she says.)

One of the PGAC’s four new exhibits is dedicated to her new work – a fusion of colors, chaos, abstraction and order, with themes revolving around music, science equations and the periodic table.

“I paint on the floor, using stains and pouring and drips,” she says. “I walk around the piece. It’s a very physical style of painting. My larger studio allows that.”

It also affords her other amenities.

“My studio’s around the corner from the PGAC. It’s 15 minutes away from my home. There’s a little coffee shop up the street. Lovers Point is down the street. It’s away from my kids (laughs). Juice and Java has a drip bar and free Wi-Fi. It’s like a little bohemian corner. I’m in heaven.”

Last month’s Wine, Art&Music Walk marked the grand opening of the MG Gallery and, says proprietor Goodell, it was “wildly successful.”

Goodell’s gallery space is compact in width, but high of ceiling, which he takes full advantage of by deliberately plastering with creative and kooky works and toys. They include comic book panels of one of his super-hero creations, shelves of sci-fi and horror movie action figures, model cars, obscure DVDs, classic rock records, autographed photos of Batman’s Adam West and drummer Buddy Rich, art books, framed photos of his own rock ‘n roll glory days, and what can only be summed up as miscellanea.

“Superheroes are positive,” he says animatedly. “They’re an important part of pop culture. Sci-fi is hope for the future: ‘We’re still going to exist in the future.’”

The campy visual accessories (he describes it as a “museum of my stuff”), and floor to ceiling curtains, obscure the rear half of the roughly 300 square-foot space: there sits a recording studio, with synthesizers, mixing board, and computers with Pro Tools. He uses it to produce other artists, but Goodell, who also sells Porsches, is itching to put it to another use.

“I want to join a band [again],” he says. “I want to make albums, and I want to go on tour. I would love to play in a classic rock band.”

Goodell will gladly defer that dream this Friday night, when he again reaps the creative crowds that pour in for the Wine, Art&Music Walk. Even though the word “wine” takes the lead in the event title, with “music” a distant third, “art” – scientific and colorful or campy and obscure – is at the center of the night’s revelries.