DAWN AND THE BEACHCOMBER

It’s barely 6:30 in the morning, but Jack Baker--painter, gardener, collector of interesting stuff--wants to go to the beach. Not for the sun (it hasn’t appeared yet), or the waves (surf’s still small), but for the turbans--spotty, fist-size shells heaped around his garden, his painting studio and his house. Why? “I’m a bit vague on that yet,” he admits, leading the way from his back door to a crook of coast 13 miles south of Santa Barbara. “This is one of the first places the Spanish landed, old Chumash Indian ground, famous surf spot,” he explains, adding that the turbans have been a human food source throughout history.

History fascinates Baker--”the relentless flow of it, the dogged march of people through the ages and the treasures they leave behind.” Nature leaves its treasures too: birds’ nests, polished rocks, the spotted turbans. “There’s one. Oh, my, look, there’s another,” he cackles, plucking the wave-washed shells from a snarl of kelp.

Already I’m regretting that I followed him out without a proper bag. And that Eric Nagelmann, the garden designer who first brought me here a month ago, didn’t warn me about the dynamo that is Baker. I might have drunk more coffee or at least brought a bigger notebook. Because giant snail shells are only the beginning of a list of collectible objects that keeps growing during the day I spend with Baker, trailing him in and out of the old garage he converted to a beach house 30 years ago. By afternoon it includes things I’ve hardly noticed before but now feel I must have, too: soft, pitted bricks from the 1930s, Maine lobster buoys and hand-hooked rugs, fire buckets, boccie balls, massive wooden horsemen from the palace of an Indian maharajah, who traded them for some of Baker’s paintings. Then there are the outdoor marvels: the 10-foot-tall callas with spattered leaves, shaving brush palms, tree fuchsias and the cobalt-blue cinerarias that sprout everywhere in Baker’s garden and are really what I came to see.

Though Baker, 75, has been well-known since the ‘60s for his lavish, color-mad paintings of flowers, jungles, wild animals and, lately, surfers, he is also justly famous for his landscaping--a sort of Balinese-California fantasy that erupts for nearly an acre around his house.

Being a garden person, I’d wanted to visit his dreamy jungle for years, since I first learned of it from Nagelmann, himself an artist who started in high school helping Baker plant and tend his place.

“Jack loves experiments. He loves change. He’s always trying things for the fun of it,” Nagelmann told me during my earlier visit as as he led the way under Baker’s dragon trees, draped improbably with roses. “He’s not afraid of color and he’s not worried about tomorrow.” Which fits in nicely with a quote of Baker’s I had heard before: “I like everything to be larger than life--especially life.”

When I first came here with Nagelmann, I was surprised at how small and still Baker was among his mammoth palms, dripping vines and mazelike paths, configured in the Balinese style to foil demons. He apologized for the debris, in particular the shells and bricks he’d been gathering after winter storms. “In the ‘30s,” he said, “there was a brick factory up the canyon, and when it rains, these still wash up on the beach.” Knocking two together, he produced a subtle chime. “One day soon I’ll work them into something.”

I saw how other finds had been incorporated into the composition--ceramic Fu dogs, driftwood, Mexican wrought iron--emerging through the overgrowth like bits of a lost civilization. The house itself, which has at one time or another been painted every color of the rainbow, is now a tall white confection, like a colonial outpost in a palm forest.

I found myself edging toward its windows, peering in at a huge portrait of a bearded emperor that dominates the kitchen. From there it was a short hop to several vats of shells, a clan of perky shorebirds on a log and those enigmatic horsemen. Wooden animals lurked in corners--dogs, cats, wheeled elephants--some painted, some adorned with feathers, alongside model boats and canoe-shaped bowls of cowrie shells. Spying heedlessly, half forgetting myself, I came to the French doors of Baker’s studio. Inside, more feathers, more shells. Vintage surfboards resting against walls. Waves rolling across canvas, depicting what Baker calls “the ritual and ballet of surfing.” Men in wet suits with dogs. Exercising on the sand. Plunging in. Churning with the motion of the sea.

I saw it would be useless to try to separate any part of this from any other. Inspiration, medium, art. Collector and painter. Garden and house. Why try?

*

LIKE A LIGHTHOUSE OR LOBSTER BOAT, BAKER’S COTTAGE smells of salt and damp wood and has a lofty view. His bedroom, once rigged out like a pasha’s (during his madcap ‘70s phase when, as the darling of Santa Barbara socialites, he was throwing parties in silk tents), recalls a crow’s nest now. It overlooks a slice of sea and is papered with nautical charts of the Maine coast, where he’s had a summer house for the past 10 years. The antique American bed is a find from Maine, where he attends auctions religiously. “My garage is groaning. It’s collapsing under the weight of things,” he concedes. Yet not collecting is unthinkable. “I might miss something fabulous.”

Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, Baker grew up in Orange County and Ventura during the ‘20s and ‘30s. His father--a news editor, later a land appraiser--grew avocados while Baker raised irises. Always seduced by bizarre and exotic forms in nature, Baker was riveted by the flame-red miracle that these dull brown bulbs produced. When he started painting at Pomona College in the ‘40s, he chose flowers as his subjects.

After college, he gravitated to Paris with other young artists, learning about Parisian style from streets and shop windows, from the clothes and furnishings through which the chic French expressed themselves. “Chanel suits were in force then,” he remembers. “That great, simple Chanel smartness was everywhere.”

Style wasn’t enough, however, to make him stay. He craved richer, less familiar sights, and though newly married to his California sweetheart, Lynn, with whom he had a son, he jumped at a job teaching drawing to engineers in Ethiopia. Thus began a dramatic chapter in his life, when, after hours, he plunged into the “Alice in Wonderland” pageant of Emperor Haile Selassie’s court, where ox meat was served on delicate French tables. It is Selassie’s portrait that hangs in the kitchen.

From there Baker embarked on travel adventures that took him to Africa, India, Bali, Sri Lanka, the former Soviet Union and the Canary Islands. Even after returning to Santa Barbara in the late ‘50s to teach art at Santa Barbara High School, he continued traveling, financing trips with foreign art shows or by importing antiques and selling them locally.

His paintings reflect far-flung influences from his travels, such as Indian saris in diaphanous blues, pinks, yellows and greens or lush African subtropical scenes that led him away from “the easy pleasures of flowers” to more psychologically layered images of birds, animals and jungle landscapes. His study of Balinese gardens moved him to transform his own from a collection of blooms he had planted to paint (ranunculus, clivias, sweet peas) to a pastiche of tropical and succulent rarities.

Long before Asian teak and textiles and Balinese umbrellas became the province of designers, Baker decked his house with them in a style he calls “exotica run rampant.” He mixed antique and junk-shop finds, hanging beach hats and birds’ nests and piling up baskets, and then painting his created scenes. “When I collect,” he says, “I keep an eye out for uncommon things, things in multiples I can stack or put in rows or associate with other things--objects with history that have been touched by many hands.”

Which doesn’t mean they will last forever in this world. As soon as he seizes on something new--fishtail palms, whale bones, Japanese torii gates--he switches gears, tossing out trees that languish or overwhelm, letting the gates fall to pieces in the coastal fog. “People haven’t always known what to expect from me,” he says. For a while, coupled with his considerable commercial success, this unpredictability fed his reputation as a character, one whose arrival got any party going and defied the rules of polite company. Such wildness also helped end his marriage. But it never detracted from his discipline or his output as a painter. For the last 40-odd years, until a recent brush with cancer slowed him a bit, he has risen at dawn, painted until dark and shown his work in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London and India, all the while reinventing his art as ceaselessly as he moves his furniture around. “I look back on old paintings,” he reflects, “old pictures of my garden and house, and wonder, who did that? I wouldn’t paint that now. I couldn’t. I’m not that person anymore.”

Nor is he interested to the same degree in traveling, appearing in design magazines or having another large, lucrative public art show. Even his color palette has calmed down, as evidenced by the pale hooked rugs and subtle milk paints on those lobster buoys.

Maine, where one of two his children has settled, is now his primary inspiration. It offers another, more rugged version of his beloved California coast and allows him to grow rugosa roses and to rub shoulders with creative originals such as the painting Wyeths, his Port Clyde neighbors, whose austere style has spawned schools of imitators. While Baker doesn’t covet the Wyeth style, he admits that, “More and more, I’d like to think like that.”

And, of course, those barn sales and country auctions feed his collecting yen, giving him raw material for the collages that decorate his house.

Such raw material comes from nature, too. Take those bricks he gathered on the beach. During the month between my first and second visits, he used them to create a kind of tidal wash along a path and a mosaic bench for garden viewing. “I can’t wait to get up in the morning,” he says. “Every day, every minute, I want to see what there is to see, to paint and to prowl for treasures and then figure out what to make of them.” He waves his turban shells. “If we hadn’t gotten to the beach early, someone else would have found these.”