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Angela and Steve own 56 acres near the Gold Country town of Fiddletown. The ranch is emblazoned with huge, colorful graffiti murals which have been sprayed on barns, the sides of buildings and travel trailers parked on the ranch.Sacramento Bee/Michael Allen Jones |
Safan Ranch, where spirits dwell in the sunset, where the air is sibilant with the hiss of aerosol, is located near rustic Fiddletown. Visitors plow up a gravel road and follow a procession of colorful banners that flap and shudder in a foothill breeze.
So far, nothing out of the ordinary.
Suddenly, there is a welcoming committee, a detonation really, of squawks, clucks, whoops, howls, cries, the amiable panting of two border collies, and whatever guttural sounds a herd of baleful goats make.
The beaked natives are restless.
The sky is radiant blue, the soil a gritty rust. The ranch is pie-shaped, sloped, with gullies and plateaus. It is thick with ponderosa pine, live oak, hedges of manzanita, and crisscrossed with wire fence. But there's something odd, out of place.
There, in a bucolic meadow, looking much like a collection of retired New York City subway cars, is an encampment of vintage travel trailers, really old road dogs, whose sides are emblazoned with wild swipes of color, of coded motifs, of cursive extravaganzas.
Welcome to Graffiti Paradise.
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The couple hope someday to have a noteworthy collection of graffiti art in the foothills.Sacramento Bee/Michael Allen Jones |
Safan Ranch is owned by Steve and his art accomplice, Angela. In 2001, they bought 56 acres. Angela put in an organic garden and built this coop for her brood of Araucana hens from Peru, that, prolific layers, produce tasty eggs in subtle shell tints of pink, blue, green.
The property had a derelict barn, once inhabited by a Fiddletown eccentric and his crew of free-range cows and pigs. In hindsight, it would have been much cheaper to tear down the dilapidated barn. Instead, the couple, who believe in heroic recycling, opted to rehabilitate the hovel and transform it into a house.
What a nightmare. They did most of the work themselves. That is, Angela did most of the labor. The results are stunning. The two-story house is open, airy, minimal, with a front porch, a stained concrete floor, a spacious kitchen, and an upstairs mezzanine with two offices, a bath, master bedroom.
Every inch of space is crowded with either canvas or carved art, the latter -- bowls, drums, spears, shields, masks, fierce statues, wooly headdresses, spiritual totems -- are made by a visually sophisticated tribe from New Guinea.
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Steve and Angela's home near Fiddletown is decorated with tribal art from the Asmat of New Guinea.Sacramento Bee/Michael Allen Jones |
It all makes for a tropical, slightly fierce atmosphere. No pump handles. No wagon wheels. No sluice boxes. None of the hokey artifacts one usually finds piled outside plush cabins in the foothills.
Then, the work finished, a satisfied Steve looked out at his greening dominion and said, "Fiat lux!"
No, inspired by this Picasso of a passing train he spied once in Europe resplendent in a skin of graffiti, what he actually said was, "Let's invite artists to come up here and paint. We have all this space, all these walls. Let's have them come up here and they can paint whatever they want, without fear of it being buffed (painted) over."
First, he bought a caravan of trailers.
Then he ran an ad on the Craigslist Web site.
And, enticed by white space, the artists came, pitched tents, took out their laptops, their crates of spray cans. They came from Sacramento, Stockton, San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City. And they began to write. Street artists, some renowned, with noms de rue such as "Draw," "Paydirt," "Mynas," "Gelos," "Drone," "Bishop," "Syer," "Baser," "Tomser," "Kwok," "Dzyer" and "Cuba."
The first mural was done in the summer of 2005. It takes up the entire north side of the house, a monumental, 34-by-26-foot canvas. Called "Blood Money," it features a broken scale of justice, a sundered American flag, a pile of swag and, with dire overtones of Dante or Bosch, these stricken souls being hurled face first into a blazing, golden inferno.
What must the neighbors think?
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The Safan Ranch has become a haven for graffiti artists, whom owners Steve and Angela have invited to their land to spray paint the walls of their barn and travel trailers.Sacramento Bee/Michael Allen Jones |
And that was just the beginning. The couple built a new, even bigger barn in the back (think of it as a gallery turned inside out), whose walls are ripe with canvases. Along with the Mission District in San Francisco and parts of East Los Angeles, Safan Ranch is now a leading sanctuary of graffiti art, an outdoor Getty of spectacular aerosol.
Steve is 51 years old. He is thin, tanned, with hazel eyes and wavy hair pulled back in a knot. He has on jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, which seem rather sassy footwear for a ranchhand. He is endlessly talkative, brashly opinionated. Still, he appears an inveterate city boy ill-suited for the bedrock conservatism of Amador County. But the foothills have always welcomed its share of mystics, misfits, urban refugees, flamboyant flatlanders.
He says, in a stroke of typical élan, "If it's just a pretty picture, I don't believe it's art. Art has to disturb. Art has to be controversial."
Angela is 44 years old. She's all Irish, a confirmed naturalist, with red hair, blue eyes, milk skin, a floppy hat. She's happiest in her organic eden, in the flurry of her cage-free chickens. She says, in unabashed sincerity and passion, "I want to keep my hands in the dirt. Growing our own food, raising our animals, with respect for the earth."
One recent afternoon, after a lunch of arugula salad, freshly picked from the garden, a cheesy frittata made by Steve, eggs lifted that morning from the nest, and a pleasant, ruby-hued Barbera rosé, which Angela bottled, the couple tell their adventure story.
Steve Steve, who was born and raised in San Jose, is a graduate of Santa Clara University. His father was a self-made man who taught his son a lasting work ethic and a profitable appreciation for numbers.
At 17, Steve bought his first piece of property at Lake Tahoe. At 18, he was working for Atari, one of the very first high-tech firms to start in what was to become Silicon Valley. He remained with Atari for 11 years, working in finance, and later moved to another high-tech company in Salt Lake City. He made his nest egg. At 35, he retired.
"I was a corporate capitalist," he says, in seeming apology. "My job was to make people miserable on a daily basis. But that's not what I'm all about."
So, long fascinated by art and anthropology, he fled to the jungle. To a remote part of New Guinea, which was populated by a tribe known as the Asmat. He studied their culture, fell in love with their art. "What we can learn from the Asmat is happiness," he says. "They don't have stuff. They have families. And traditions. You learn what's important in life."
Upon his return to Salt Lake City, he decided to shed his extraneous lifestyle. He got rid of his shiny Porsche. His fabulous house. He and his wife divorced. And, since 1992, he has returned again and again to New Guinea and has assembled an extensive collection of Asmat art, many pieces of which he has donated to museums.
Angela was born and raised in Lizton, Ind., a hamlet her family help settle in 1830. She grew up on a farm. Her grand- father owned a hardware store and hatchery. A marriage brought her to Salt Lake City, where she worked for the Chamber of Commerce. Years later, celebrating her divorce, she attended a John Mayall concert and bumped into a tanned, handsome bushman.
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In 2001, the couple were looking for a place in the sun in the Shenandoah Valley. The moment they saw this neglected spread in Fiddletown, they both felt an instant affinity. Especially Angela, who, driving up the gravel road that day, said she heard angels sing, saw a red-tailed hawk circling in the sky.
The Asmats believe that ancestral spirts dwell in the sunset. They call this resplendent paradise "safan" (pronounced "saw-fawn"). Steve and Angela have faith in this sunny concept of the afterlife, too. So, they called their place Safan Ranch.
Today, the two keep busy. Angela has a sprouting organic produce business, and gathers about six dozen eggs a day from her brood of 80 hens. She has a list of poultry customers. On Sundays, she works the tasting room at nearby Vino Noceto winery. A basket of her eggs usually are for sale there, too.
"I like the weather," says Angela, who seems a California girl at heart. "I like the people. I like the way it feels. I felt very stifled in Salt Lake City. I wore nylons and had really stupid hair."
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Angela likes to keep her hands in the dirt by growing her own food and raising animals. In addition to her Araucana hens and organic garden, a herd of goats resides on the ranch.Sacramento Bee/Michael Allen Jones |
Steve, for his part, seems a restless soul. He still battles primeval urges to make money. He seeks the Thoreauvian ideal of a reduced footprint. To live like an Asmat warrior. That is if an Asmat warrior enjoyed good food, fine wine and wintering in Argentina (which he often does).
At times, life at Safan, the dawn chorale of the chickens below their window notwithstanding, can be too peaceful. Steve has to make periodic forays into the asphalt jungle, to visit museums, to hang out in a cafe, to get into a political argument.
In many respects, he is importing the city here. By his way of thinking, the Asmat and the aerosol artists share much in common. One is jungle. One is urban. But both are tribes, with a distinctive iconography.
Does the ranch live up to its name?
Angela thinks so. "For me, it's already paradise," she says, her face aglow. "This is safan for me."
Steve, ever the corporate chief, used to deciphering a business prospectus, sees more artwork, more trailers, more installations. Much more aerosol in the foothills. "We're only starting," he promises. "I think it's a 20-year project."
Outside, the late afternoon sun is beginning its plummet. On the south side of the house, there is another, all-encompassing mural, by "Paydirt," which is a graphic tribute to Safan Ranch. Nearby, are the vestiges of Western civilization -- a spa, a barbecue, a picnic table, a stack of firewood.
In a tree, dangling by a fish line, lightly bobbing in the breeze, is a spent can of bright-red Krylon spray paint. "No runs. No drips. No errors."
Think of it as an archaeological fossil.