I’ve had Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” on repeat for no good reason. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, art and design columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and I’m just itching for a good walk — and some essential arts news:

A story of repair

For two and a half years, conservators at the Getty have been working on the cracking limewood panels that bear one of the greatest treasures of European art in L.A.: a pair of 16th century paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder featuring Adam and Eve. After plenty of tender loving care by a conservation team that included Ulrich Birkmaier, George Bisacca and José de la Fuente, the painting, which is in the collection of the Norton Simon, will be going on view at the Getty for three months starting next week.

Times art critic Christopher Knight followed the conservation process, which he reports has left the works “beautifully restored.” “Adam” and “Eve,” he notes, are “one of those great have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too images.”

I’ve always been curious about the work that conservators do. Artists get the glory, but conservators are the behind-the-scenes workers who help assure that glory is lasting. An artist can help you see the world in flashes of color or as a conceptual joke; conservators teach you about the nature of materials and how they hold.

In her memoir “Dwell Time,” L.A.-based sculpture conservator Rosa Lowinger weaves stories of materials and conservation with those of her own Cuban Jewish family, who first fled Europe, then fled Cuba after Castro’s revolution. (Full disclosure: Lowinger is a friend.) Her book, inspired by the structure of Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table: A Memoir,” weaves family tales around the materials she works with: plastics, ceramic, glass.

“Our job was not simply to ‘repair things,’” Lowinger writes of her chosen profession in the book. “Our task was to do our work in a way that nullified our presence, refrained from fanciful interpretations, and remained reversible. Reversibility, especially, was fundamental. Everything we used or did had to be removable by someone else in the future. What a moving, transcendent idea. Our mark was to be temporary, short term. We were beholden to the object and were not to change it permanently.”

Time contributor Jessica Ferri spoke with Lowinger about what sparked her memoir and what it meant to dig deep into the uncomfortable fractures within families.

“As you crack open the story, I had to crack open mine,” says Lowinger. “I was writing about my mother, who is charismatic and funny but monstrously destructive, I would have to get up and hyperventilate a bit. It wasn’t painful, but it felt like surfing in the Pacific Ocean.”