Scmford Darling Paints His House

The Santa Barbara, Calif., Chamber of Commerce does not include Sanford Darling's home on its tour of local attractions, but perhaps it should. TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler visited Darling's small frame house on Rancheria Street. His report:

Just when it seemed that life was about over for Sanford Darling, it started all over again. It happened one day when Darling, already 68 years old, was standing on his front lawn, trying to decide what color to paint his house. He stood there stooped, red-faced and wrinkled from a not very eventful life: a poor, fatherless adolescence; ten restless years as a chiropractor, a calling that he gave up because the hours were too long; 27 years as a technician for Mobil Oil, interrupted by frequent golf and fishing trips; the death, on his retirement, of his wife; and then a six-month Grand Tour, followed by his return to Santa Barbara, where he slowly learned to cook his own meals and live alone.

Darling enjoyed his world tour so much that he repeated it the following year. Now, as he stood contemplating his small frame house, visions of beautiful ladies in Thailand and Singapore, heaving ships at sea, castles on the Rhine bubbled through his brain. He seized his 3-in. brush and green semigloss enamel and began to paint a small grass hut on one wall. It wasn't bad, considering that he had never painted a picture in his life. By the end of the day, the wall was decorated with glassy-eyed maidens and churning waves, and Sanford Darling had found a new career.

Beguiling Maidens. "Anything that was flat, I painted a picture on," recalls Darling, his blue eyes glowing. On his pitched roof, he painted an impressionistic harbor scene with sailboats, white mountains and a shining lighthouse that can be seen two blocks away. He soon discovered that the compressed cardboard backs of old television sets had just the right absorptive quality for the semigloss house paint he favored; he painted scenes on as many of these cardboard backs as he could get his hands on, and mounted them on the outside walls of his house. In his artistic development, Darling went through a fairly long Cezanne period and had an affair with early Grandma Moses. In his short Renoir stage, he managed to get the soft wispy effect in his tree leaves by dabbing on latex paint with an ordinary shaving brush. When he was under the Turner influence, he found he could create raging waves by running a dry thumb across Sherwin-Williams Aqua CE 640.

As a visitor approaches Darling's house today, he is confronted by a bewildering jumble of wild colors. He walks along a cement path adorned with Oriental mountains, and climbs a porch whose walls are filled with the birds, bears and skunks of Yellowstone National Park. He passes through a Mount Fuji screen door and walks upon upside-down rugs that glow with still lifes. He sits in a leatherette armchair covered with a rushing river in an idyllic field of gold, and rests his feet upon a footstool that depicts a deep green forest. On the ceiling, he sees snake-infested pagodas, grass huts and beguiling maidens. In the kitchen, the refrigerator door opens onto another pastoral scene; the garbage can is early Picasso.

"See that beer tray?" asks Darling. "Milwaukee, 1919. Over there on the closet door, that's an old lumber boat I saw off the coast. And over there, that's a peach tree we used to steal peaches from when we were kids. That's Barcelona, that's an old guy in Genoa, that there's Beirut."

"Come Right In!" In his backyard, Darling proudly shows more walls of art. "That one there," he says, "that's where we used to go boar hunting. And that's the Snake River. We camped there one night to fish, and next morning 2,000 Indians--see their tepees? --had camped right behind us. And there's old Seabiscuit, the horse that won nearly half a million dollars." On the wall of the guest house is a Dutch windmill; there are ballet dancers in the tool shed, next to some Asian peasants crossing a footbridge. The fuse box is set in Hong Kong.

Since Sanford began his project eight years ago, he has covered his house and possessions with more than 1,000 pictures. Eight thousand people, including Muhammad Ali, "an ambassador and a European prince," have come to see them; all have been greeted by signs on the front lawn that say "Welcome!" "Free!" and "Come right in!" At 76, his golf cap, pants and shirt speckled with house paint, Sanford Darling seems to be at peace with himself. "There's so much to paint yet," he says. "Why, I haven't even started on the bedrooms. What do you think I ought to put in that front room? Little grass hut in Penang? Castle over in Germany?"

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