Meet the Artist

It’s not easy being a working artist, but as long as one doesn’t expect to make a living at it – sort of like writing these days – one can find release and satisfaction in creating. One such creator is Swedish-born Birgitta Baker, whose impressive paintings were on full display at the Santa Barbara Club recently, thanks to JoAnn Mermis and Wes St. Clair (a good friend of Birgitta’s late husband, Richard), who invited Birgitta to display her most recent output. She came from the Bay area (studied art and psychology at Berkeley) and was there with her daughter, Monika.

Birgitta tells me that her father, Thore, was an engineer and her early inspiration; he painted in both watercolor and oil. She favors oil, but before choosing that medium, dabbled in French watercolor, which required outlining first in ink. Ms Baker is not signed up with a gallery, but she does display her work at Village Frame in the upper village. 

Birgitta has a home in Lake Tahoe and just returned from Sweden, where she tries to go every year. “I have lots and lots of family there,” she says during a short conversation on the outside patio of the Santa Barbara Club, and reveals they have “a family island (of 7 or 8 acres) on the archipelago outside Stockholm.” She explains that there are 30,000 islands outside Stockholm and “a lot of people have their country homes there.”

Birgitta’s water scenes were the most popular and were also the ones that sold the most at her modest asking prices.

She also revealed another Swedish secret: how to take a real sauna: “Stay in the sauna until you count seven drops of sweat from your nose, and then you go jump into the Baltic.”

Although she has been painting off and on since she was a child, when her husband died she began painting in earnest. Her favorite subjects are mountains, oceans, and flowers, and she paints with palette and knife rather than a brush, all in oil. “Acrylic dries too quickly,” she says.

If you’d like to learn more, see more, or even purchase one of Birgitta’s paintings, you can email her at birgittabaker1@gmail.com.