D A V I D    B R Y A N T    S T U D I O

​T H E  ​​B A R G E S   OF   D E L   B A X T E R

When the elusive Del Baxter, Salton Sea folk artist, saw a rural Peruvian woodcarver’s handiwork in a magazine that washed ashore at the Sea, he was off and carving!

The Peruvian, Ernesto Del Catamaran, like our artist Del Baxter, finds chunks of wood on beaches or in the desert, taking them home to his adobe hut.  As Ernesto says, translated to English, “with my knife and chisel I release the sculpture locked inside.  Boats, and animals and other cool creatures and stuff.” 

“Aha,” thought Del, “That’s kinda like what I do with scrap at the Salton Sea.”  Indeed it is.  But Del’s invented history of the Sea is at work here as well.  He has no idea that the Salton Sea was an accident, based on storm driven breach of the Colorado River as it passed a low point on its way to the Sea of Cortez.  River water flowed for more than a year, filling up that depression in the desert, like a bowl, to become California’s largest lake.  

In Del’s mind, the Salton Sea is not 110 years old, it has always been where it is, just like it is, and will always be as it is.  Thirty years of Salton Sea sunrises and sunsets, enjoyed while gulping gallons of lukewarm Sanka can have an effect on the keenest mind.  Del never had the keenest mind but he has a good deal of talent in appropriating art - simple, primitive, hand whittled, folk art, taking it and making it his own.

This webpage represents Del’s 2013-2015 life, a nearly full-time devotion to making the kinds of merchant and vacation barges he imagines plied the salty waters of his Salton Sea about 2000 years ago.  Del makes his paints from cacti and other plant material, pounded into mush, then mixed with salt water, “painted” on the wood with rags for big areas.  He uses toothpicks dipped in his smelly “paints” for small details.  His courageous colors capture Del’s unstated but clear infatuation with Latin American folk art. 

These “barges” have curious cargo and equally strange navigators or oarsmen. They represent, to Del, a golden era of the Salton Sea when it was a world out of a children’s book or cobbled together in his own childlike imagination. To Del, he sees the Sea as a once lively place.  It teemed with barge traffic heading to and fro, it had islands as home to extinct creatures. The civilization of the Sea was fueled by a commercial trade of animals, pets, and natural oddities by people or others with enough savvy to own a barge, to go fetch a new friend with it, and to bring it home.

Del Baxter’s mind is truly his own.  His visions would be impossible to fathom, as he rarely speaks beyond a kind of invented gibberish driven by loneliness and solitude.  No trace of a social life and his world as a squatter brewing Sanka on a campfire beside his borrowed trailer, can make a man less than healthy and nowhere near wealthy but it is a big boost for his imagination.         

We are lucky that Del emerges, now and then, at purely random moments to entertain us with his folk art.  Del delivered these pieces in his $52 1970 Pinto, which he recently painted to mimic Janis Joplin’s 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet, a classic 1960’s art piece where psychedelics met German steel to form an automotive icon.  Del barely remembers Janis Joplin, doesn’t know that Porsche from a Prius, but his folk art is authentic and all his own.