The Wildlife of T.C.

Boyle's Santa Barbara

The author finds inspiration at the doorstep of his Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house near the

central California town

• By T.C. Boyle
• Photographs by Todd Bigelow
• Smithsonian magazine, February 2011

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"Right out the window is a kind of nature preserve all in itself," says T.C. Boyle in his Santa Barbara home.

Todd Bigelow

The Wildlife of T.C. Boyle's Santa Barbara

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• Danville, Virginia: Hallowed Ground

Eighteen years ago, over the Labor Day weekend, I moved with my family to Montecito, an
unincorporated area of some 10,000 souls contiguous to Santa Barbara. The house we’d bought was
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909 and had been on the market for well over a year, as the
majority of prospective buyers apparently didn’t want to negotiate the soul-wrenching, divorce-
provoking drama of restoration it required. Built of redwood, with a highly flammable (and, as I was
later to learn, leaky) shake roof, the house was in need of a foundation, earthquake retrofitting and
rat eviction, as well as innumerable other things we didn’t want to worry ourselves with that first
weekend. We stocked the larder, set up beds for the children, and then, taking advantage of the
crisp, bugless nights, my wife and I tossed a mattress on one of the two sleeping porches and wound
up sleeping outside off and on until we were able finally to accomplish the move of our furniture up
from Los Angeles three months later.

That first night was a small miracle—sea air, wisps of fog skirting the lawn in the early hours,
temperatures in the 60s—considering that we’d become accustomed to the unvarying summer blaze
of the San Fernando Valley, where we’d lived for the previous decade. Never mind that we were
awakened by the cries of the children informing us that strangers were in the house (an elderly
couple, thinking that the place was still open for viewing, were blithely poking through the living
room at 8 a.m.) or that the rats had been celebrating a sort of rat rodeo in the walls all night—we
were in paradise. Behind us rose the dun peaks of the Santa Ynez Mountains, replete with the full
palette of wild and semi-wild creatures and laced with hiking trails, and before us, gleaming through
the gaps of the trees not five blocks distant, was the fat, shimmering breast of the mighty Pacific.
The fog rolled, the children ate cereal, I unpacked boxes.

In the afternoon, under an emergent and beneficent sun, I set off exploring, digging out my mask,
snorkel and flippers and heading down, on foot, to the beach. There was a crowd—this was the
Labor Day weekend, after all, and Santa Barbara is, undeniably, a tourist town—but I wasn’t fazed.
Do I like crowds? No. Do I like solitary pursuits (hiking the aforementioned trails, writing fiction,
brooding over a deserted and wind-swept beach)? Yes. But on this occasion I was eager to see just
what was going on beneath the waves as people obliviously careened past me to dive and splash
while the children shrieked out their joy. The water that day, and this isn’t always the case, was
crystalline, and what I was able to discover, amid the pale slash of feet and legs, was that all the
various ray species of the ocean were holding a convocation, the floor of the sea carpeted with them,
even as the odd bat ray or guitarfish sailed up to give me a fishy eye. Why people were not stung or
spiked, I can’t say, except to presume that such things don’t happen in paradise.

Of course, there’s a downside to all this talk—the firestorms of the past few years and the mudslides
that invariably succeed them, the omnipresent danger of the mega-earthquake like the one that
reduced Santa Barbara’s commercial district to duff and splinters in 1925—but on an average day,
Lotos-eaters that we are, we tend to forget the dangers and embrace the joys. Downtown Santa
Barbara is two miles away, and there we can engage with one of our theater companies, go to the
symphony or a jazz or rock club, dine out on fine cuisine, stroll through the art museum, take in
lectures, courses or plays at one of our several colleges, hit the bars or drift through the Santa
Barbara Mission, established in the 1780s (and which I’ve visited exactly once, in the company of
my mentor and former history professor, the late Vince Knapp, who’d torn himself away from the
perhaps not so paradisiacal Potsdam, New York, to come for a visit). All this is well and good. But
what attracts me above all else is the way nature seems to slip so seamlessly into the urbanscape
here.

For example, a portion of the property on which the house sits is zoned as environmentally sensitive
because of the monarch butterflies that gather there in the fall. When they come—and the past few
years their numbers have been very light, worrisomely so, though I’ve been planting milkweed to
sustain their larvae—they drape the trees in a gray curtain till the sun warms them enough to get
them floating around like confetti. I’ve kept the yard wild for their benefit and to attract other
creatures as well. A small pond provides a year-round water source, and though we are so close to
the village a good golfer could just about land a drive atop the Chinese restaurant from our
backyard, a whole host of creatures makes use of it, from raccoons to opossums to the occasional
coyote and myriad birds, not to mention skinks, lizards and snakes.

Unfortunately, a good portion of the forest here represents a hundred years’ growth of invasives able
to thrive in a frost-free environment, black acacia and Victorian box foremost among them, but I do
my best to remove their seedlings while at the same time encouraging native species like the coast
live oak and Catalina cherry. So right here, right out the window, is a kind of nature preserve all in
itself, and if I want a bit more adventure with our fellow species, I can drive up over the San Marcos
Pass and hike along the Santa Ynez River in the Los Padres National Forest or take the passenger
boat out to Santa Cruz Island, which lies about 25 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara.

This last is a relatively new diversion for me. Until two years ago I’d never been out to the Channel
Islands, but had seen Santa Cruz hovering there on the near horizon like another world altogether
and wondered, in the way of the novelist, just what goes on out there. The Channel Islands National
Park is one of the least visited of all our national parks, incidentally, for the very simple reason that
you have to lean over the rail of a boat and vomit for an hour just to get there. Despite the
drawbacks, I persisted, and have visited Santa Cruz (which is four times the size of Manhattan)
several times now. One of the joys of what I do is that whenever anything interests me I can study it,
examine it, absorb all the stories surrounding it and create one of my own.

So, for instance, I wrote The Women, which deals with Frank Lloyd Wright, because I wanted to
know more about the architect who designed the house I live in, or Drop City, set in Alaska, because
our last frontier has always fascinated me—or, for that matter, The Inner Circle, about Alfred C.
Kinsey, because I just wanted to know a wee bit more about sex. And so it was with the Channel
Islands. Here was this amazing resource just off the coast, and I began to go there in the company of
some very generous people from the Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service to explore
this exceedingly precious and insular ecosystem, with an eye to writing a novel set here. (The
resulting book is called When the Killing’s Done.) What attracted me ultimately is the story of the
island’s restoration, a ringing success in the light of failures and extinctions elsewhere.

Introduced species were the problem. Before people settled tenuously there, the native island fox,
the top terrestrial predator, had over the millennia developed into a unique dwarf form (the foxes
are the size of house cats and look as if Disney created them). Sheep ranching began around the
1850s, and pigs, introduced for food, became feral. When some 30 years ago the island came into
the possession of the Nature Conservancy and later the National Park Service, the sheep—inveterate
grazers—were removed, but the pigs continued their rampant rooting, and their very tasty piglets
and the foxes were open to predation from above. Above? Yes—in a concatenation of events Samuel
Beckett might have appreciated, the native piscivorous bald eagles were eliminated from the islands
in the 1960s because of DDT dumping in Santa Monica Bay, and they were replaced by golden
eagles flying in from the coast in order to take advantage of the piglet supply. The foxes, which
numbered some 1,500 in the mid-1990s, were reduced to less than a tenth of that number and
finally had to be captive-bred while the feral pigs were eradicated, the goldens were trapped and
transported to the Sierras and bald eagles were reintroduced from Alaska. And all this in the past
decade. Happily, I got to tramp the ravines in the company of the biologists and trap and release the
now-thriving foxes and to watch a pair of adolescent bald eagles (formidable creatures, with claws
nearly as big as a human hand) be released into the skies over the island. If I’d been looking in the
right direction—over my shoulder, that is—I could have seen Santa Barbara across the channel. And
if I’d had better eyes—eagle eyes, perhaps—I could have seen my own house there in the forest of its
trees.
Pretty exciting, all in all. Especially for a nature boy like me. And while there are equally scintillating
cities like Seattle, with its amazing interface of city and nature, or even New York, where peregrine
falcons roost atop the buildings and rain fine drops of pigeon blood down on the hot dog vendors
below, what we have here is rare and beautiful. Still, there are times when I need to get even farther
out, and that’s when I climb into the car and drive the four and a half hours up to the top of a
mountain in the Sequoia National Forest, where I am writing this now while looking out on
ponderosa and Jeffrey pines and not an invasive species in sight. Except us, that is. But that’s a
whole other story.

T. C. Boyle’s new novel, When the Killing’s Done, is set in the Channel Islands.
Wayne Thiebaud Is Not a Pop Artist
He's best known for his bright paintings of pastries and cakes, but they represent only a slice of

the American master's work

Among the familiar wayne thiebaud paintings on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento
—the still lifes of gumball machines and voluptuous bakery cakes, the brightly dressed, sober-faced
figures, the San Francisco cityscapes with their daredevil inclines—was one mysterious picture,
unlike anything else in the exhibition. It was a darkly comic painting of a man in a business suit
hanging on for dear life from the limb of a leafless tree, his briefcase tossed on the grass below. A
downtown city street loomed beyond the little park where this puzzling drama was playing out. Was
the man trying to climb up or down? And why was he there? Thiebaud tries to explain: “Essentially,
it’s about urban atmosphere, and the need to escape it.” But Man in Tree illustrates something else.
Dated “1978-2010” on the wall label, it’s a testament to Thiebaud’s tireless pursuit of the challenge
of painting—in this case, a 32-year run during which he started the picture, stopped and revisited it
again and again, delving into its forms and colors, light and shadows, even when he felt as stuck as
the man in the tree.

Thiebaud (pronounced tee-bow) may be the hardest-working artist in America. The Crocker’s
retrospective this past fall, “Wayne Thiebaud: Homecoming,” honored the longtime resident and
coincided with a milestone—he turned 90 in November. But the painter seems many years younger.
A legendary teacher at nearby University of California at Davis, he retired at age 70 but has
continued to give his hugely popular classes as professor emeritus. Friends say his energy hasn’t
flagged. Indeed, he draws or paints nearly every day and plays tennis about three times a week.

In a contemporary art world enthralled with such stunts as Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted
skull, Thiebaud is wonderfully ungimmicky. He belongs more to a classical tradition of painting
than to the Pop revolution that first propelled him to national attention in the 1960s. Then, the
sweet everydayness of his cake and pie pictures looked like cousins of Andy Warhol’s soup cans. But
where Warhol was cool and ironic, Thiebaud was warm and gently comic, playing on a collective
nostalgia just this side of sentimentality. He pushed himself as a painter—experimenting with
brushstrokes, color, composition, light and shadow. The cylindrical cakes and cones of ice cream
owed more to such masters of the still life as the 18th-century French painter Chardin, or the 20th-
century Italian Giorgio Morandi, as critics have pointed out, than to the art trends of the time.

Over the years Thiebaud has repeatedly tackled the same subjects—not to perfect a formula but to
keep exploring the formal possibilities of painting. “What kinds of varying light can you have in one
painting?” he asks. “Direct glaring light, then fugitive light, then green glow. It’s a very difficult
challenge.” We’re standing in a quiet room at the Crocker, in front of Bakery Case, painted in 1996,
three decades after his first successful gallery show in New York City featured baked goods.

Bakery Case, with its half-empty tray of frosted doughnuts, pies and a festooned wedding cake,
summons references to influential artists such as Bonnard and Matisse, as well as Josef Albers’ color
theory that the perception of color is altered by the colors around it. When Thiebaud paints an
object or form, he famously surrounds it with multiple colors, often stripes or lines, of equal
intensity, to create a halo effect—though you might not notice that unless you look closely. “They’re
fighting for position,” he says of the colors. “That’s what makes them vibrate when you put them
next to each other.”

The cakes and pies, the best known of Thiebaud’s work, are painted from his imagination and from
long-ago memories of bakeries and diners. But he also paints from life. He points to the woman in
the short skirt in his Two Seated Figures (1965). “Those are a lot like Rubens’ knees!” he says. He
likes to say he steals from the best. The woman with the pinkish cupid-like knees is his favorite
muse, his wife of 51 years, Betty Jean. Other pictures in the show reflect their life together: scenes
from Laguna Beach, where they have a second home; the streetscapes of San Francisco, where he
had a studio in the 1970s; a pair of beautiful drawings of their two sons as little boys. (Thiebaud has
two daughters from an earlier marriage.) As we move through the galleries, we begin to collect a
dozen or so museum visitors, who are surprised to discover the celebrated artist in the midst of his
own show. They listen to every word of his mini-tutorial, and two take his picture with their
cellphones.

“Now, here’s this mess,” says Thiebaud, with typical self-deprecating humor, as we head toward a
wall with several landscape paintings. They represent a new direction in his work begun about 15
years ago and inspired by an almost forgotten corner of nearby countryside. South of Sacramento
and a turn off the Interstate is an old state road that can take a person back in time, like an episode
of the “Twilight Zone,” to a California that existed long before the turn of the 21st century. As the
road winds along a levee, high above the Sacramento River delta, the banks are dotted with funky
fishing stations and bait and tackle shops; houseboats are moored to creaky docks; orchards and
farm fields spread out like counterpanes on either side of the silvery water. Thiebaud comes here to
sketch, then returns to his studio to paint.

With wildly shifting perspectives and geometric patterns created by sharp curves and hard edges,
the delta paintings recall his vertiginous San Francisco cityscapes. They look like aerial views—
there’s barely any sky or horizon line—but there are multiple vantage points. In Brown River
(2002), some fields are painted in traditional perspective while others tilt up precariously, like a
view from a roller coaster. Thiebaud sometimes paints patches of fields in unexpected hues—candy
pink or baby blue—with tiny stands of trees and toy-like farmhouses along their edges.

“My pleasure in painting these is to be at as many different levels as seems to make sense to the
pattern,” he says. “What’s intriguing about a series like this is to see how many different seasons you
can use, how many different times of day, how many different sources of light.” When he unveiled
the delta paintings in the mid-1990s, many of his admirers scratched their heads. But the British
philosopher and critic Richard Wollheim was an early champion. “These paintings exhibit a
complexity,” he wrote in Art Forum in 1999, “and, above all, an old-masterish cultivation of detail,
completely without ironical intent, that has not been observed in art since the drip paintings of
Pollock or the glorious late Ateliers of Braque.”
It is early in the morning in a leafy Sacramento neighborhood, and Thiebaud is standing in a modest
one-story building that has been converted into a private gallery for his works. Dressed in white
trousers, white shirt and athletic shoes, he’s busy arranging about two dozen paintings against one
wall—a summary of his career, which goes back even farther than the Crocker’s half-century
retrospective. The earliest work is a portrait of a fisherman in a black rain hat, painted in boldly
expressive brushstrokes when he was only 16. At the time, Thiebaud, who grew up mostly in Long
Beach, California, didn’t think he was headed for the world of fine art. He loved cartooning—he still
cites “Krazy Kat” as an influence—and that summer he worked in Disney’s animation department as
an apprentice cartoonist. He later turned to commercial art, illustrating movie posters for Universal
Pictures and working in the advertising department of Rexall Drugs. “At one point, all I wanted to
be was a red hot, highly paid advertising art director,” he says with a grin. “But I had a great friend,
Robert Mallary, who showed me how dumb I was—how limited and off course I was about what was
important in life.”

Thiebaud never lost his admiration for commercial art, but in the late 1940s he began to pursue
serious painting, and earned a master’s in art history. He joined the UC Davis faculty in 1960 as an
art instructor. He preferred teaching undergraduates and “raw beginners,” says the painter Michael
Tompkins, who was his student and assistant in the 1980s. “He wanted people who were wide open.
Without any irony, he told us his work was about scrambling around with the basic issues, like a
baseball player who still goes to spring training each year to brush up on the basics.” In teaching,
Thiebaud says, “you have to constantly rethink things.”

In the 1950s, Thiebaud, like many young artists, went to New York City. He worked at an ad agency
and frequented the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, where he became friendly with such artists
as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. But he was turned off, he once said, by the “churchy feeling
of a lot of New York painting,” with all its elaborate theories and air of reverence. As Scott Shields,
senior curator at the Crocker museum, puts it, “New York’s Abstract Expressionism didn’t work as
well for the West Coast people—that brooding angst didn’t fit.” Though Thiebaud had his first big
critical success in New York in 1962 at the Allan Stone Gallery, where he would show his work for
decades, he never became part of the city’s art scene.

“My own sense is being American is a very important part of what I feel and do,” Thiebaud says.
That Americanness, along with his appreciation of commercial art, infuses his work, starting with
the pie slices and sandwiches, the pinball machines and drum majorettes that were his early
subjects. California artists also influenced him, especially Richard Diebenkorn, who was making
representational paintings in the late 1950s and whose later series Ocean Park is reflected in the
colorful, flat geometric planes of the delta paintings.

Thiebaud has outlived many of the painters who were his friends or colleagues—the price of a long
life. But the most grievous loss for him and his wife was the death last year of their son, Paul, from
cancer, at the age of 49. Paul Thiebaud owned the private gallery in Sacramento and two others that
represent his father and other contemporary artists. “I am very proud of him,” says the painter. “We
were very close. That part made it possible to go on.”

Going on, for Thiebaud, means going to work. “He is an extraordinary painter,” says Tompkins, “but
he puts in the time. If you sit around and wait for inspiration, he would say, all you get is a sore ass.”
Thiebaud can make art almost anyplace. “I’ve worked in basements, garages, even kitchens,” he
says. “I work mostly under fluorescent lights, combined with incandescent, that allow for a certain
kind of controlled lighting, wherever I am.” His wife had a second-floor studio built onto their
Sacramento house, where he says he sometimes goes “in my pajamas.” And he also has a work space
at the private gallery.

Strolling that space, Thiebaud pauses to look at an elegant little picture of an ice-cream sundae,
rendered less sumptuously than his other odes to dessert (personally, he prefers to eat a tart lemon
meringue pie to a gooey cake). The Morandi Museum in Bologna, Italy, has asked for the donation
of a Thiebaud, and he’s thinking of sending this polite parfait. He and his wife are creating a
foundation in which to deposit his works and art he has collected—a Cézanne watercolor, an Ingres
drawing, a Rousseau jungle picture, a Balthus portrait, several de Koonings, prints by Picasso and
Matisse, among others. There might also be abstract pictures he’s rumored to have painted over the
years but never shown.

These days Thiebaud is painting a series of mountains. They look sheared in half—huge cliff-like
mounds of dark, stratified earth—and he paints the earth and rock heavily, like the rich frosting of
his cakes. Little clusters of houses or trees tend to teeter on top of these geological formations. The
pictures, like Man in Tree, are strangely ominous.

“I think there’s a dark side to his work,” says the Sacramento painter Fred Dalkey, a friend of
Thiebaud’s. “But he won’t talk about emotion in his work.” Even his pastel-colored pastry paintings,
for all their inherent cheeriness, have an aura of melancholy. “Though all dressed up as if for their
own birthday party,” the critic Adam Gopnik said of two cakes in a picture, they seem “plaintive—
longing.”

Such undertones aren’t anything that Thiebaud cares to address. What he does, with astonishing
virtuosity, is paint a pie, a river or a girl in a pink hat in a way that such a thing has never been
painted before. That’s all and that’s enough. And now, he has to run. He has a date on the tennis
court.

Cathleen McGuigan, who lives in New York City and writes about the arts, profiled Alexis
Rockman in the December 2010 issue.