Artist Couple Took to Road to Smell, and Paint, Flowers

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life . . .

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on Earth and forgotten heaven. --Henry David Thoreau

Although most of their contemporaries seem obsessed with the acquisition of material wealth, Pat and Lin Seslar had it and left it.

They sold off the big home, the Porsche. They bailed out of good-paying jobs, started a successful business and dropped that as well.

They have detoured off the yuppie fast track to success to cruise the back roads of America while still young enough to enjoy the land’s natural wonders. The Seslars have not tuned in, turned on and dropped out--Timothy Leary’s dictum to 1960s youth. Rather, they subscribe to the philosophy of 19th-Century naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau, who wrote:

“The spending of the best part of one’s life earning money to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”

Living in a Garret on Wheels

Lin and Pat live the life of artists in a garret on wheels. The Seslars traded their 2,200-square-foot “ranch” on a quarter-acre in San Diego for the more restrained comfort of a 27-foot Argosy trailer, their “land yacht.” They live the romantic’s dream of traveling, camping and painting nature--seascapes and wildflowers, generally.

Taking the time to paint, as well as smell, the flowers means significantly less income, but it has its distinct rewards, they say.

“I remember when we earned a lot more money, and we didn’t have any time and we didn’t have any money,” said Pat, whose boyish grin and enthusiasm calls to mind a 40-year-old Huckleberry Finn. “Somehow it just goes with the faster-paced life style. Now we have a lot of time and we have enough money. And we’re very, very happy.”

The snug Argosy, which measures only 8 feet by 22 feet inside, resembles the cabin of a well-appointed sailboat. With warm plaid upholstery in the living-dining area, a four-burner gas range, a refrigerator and two generators, it offers well-lighted space for working, relaxing, cooking, dining, sleeping and bathing.

Lin and Pat, who believe in roughing it only when they go backpacking, have added personal touches to the Argosy, like an extra-wide bed, videocassette recorder, Apple computer and satellite dish.

Since setting out in 1983, they have continued to crisscross the United States. Their odyssey has covered 110,000 miles.

Bears, Crash-Landings

Besides an ever-changing back yard (the dozens of state and national parks they’ve visited), the trek has been filled with its share of excitement. During the last four years they faced a charging bear in California, survived a white-water capsizing in Texas and made it through crash landings while hang gliding near Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Last month, the Seslars towed the Argosy back to a trailer park in San Diego, their home base. They will stay here at least until an exhibition of their paintings at the Tarbox Gallery, 1202 Kettner Blvd, concludes Saturday.

On view are Lin’s traditional seascapes and Pat’s flowers.

Lin’s technique is to carefully build up layers of oil paint, creating expansive, warm and inviting marine scenes in a hyper-realistic style. Pat works more rapidly in watercolor, producing smaller paintings of flowers, which frequently include a colorful monarch butterfly, a symbol of freedom.

Before the two self-taught artists began painting in the 1970s, Lin worked as a staff research assistant at UC San Diego; Pat had an administrative position with San Diego County.

In 1980, they quit their jobs to run an art gallery in Marina Village. They were turning a profit, but at a cost.

“Our days were so mapped out we met ourselves coming and going,” Pat said. “At one time, we had a scheduling board to color code our time for the various things we had to do, and that board was full.”

“Sixteen-hour days get real tiring after a while. That’s when you start to reevaluate what’s important,” he said.

The Seslars declared their freedom and embarked on a life of adventure in 1983.

Lecture Had an Impact

They decided to give up their house and 16-hour days while on a 1983 visit to the Grand Canyon. Longtime fans of the outdoors, the couple were attending a ranger lecture and learned that the average visitor spends only three hours at the Grand Canyon.

“It was totally inconceivable to me how anyone could see anything that beautiful in three hours,” Lin said.

It made them think how much they appreciated parklands, and how their hectic life style left little time to enjoy nature.

The childless couple tested life on the road in a smaller recreational vehicle, and, once they purchased the Argosy, they knew it was the life for them.

“We decided to sell our house and close the gallery” to become full-time professional artists and full-time RV’ers, Lin said. They decided to have their cake and eat it, too.

Since then, they’ve parked their trailer on the beaches of Florida, the bays of Maine, near a white-water river in Texas and in California’s rugged Sierra Nevada wildernesses.

They say they paint at least four full days each week, allowing three days for such errands as buying paint, canvases and food--and getting away from the work. That’s when they go hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim, wilderness backpacking or try something new like hot-air ballooning.

Lin is the adventurer who schedules their novel quests; Pat is the good sport.

A trim, vivacious woman in a bouffant blond hair-do reminiscent of the 1950s, Lin emits energy like a whirl-o-matic kitchen blender.

‘I’ll Do Anything Once’

“Heck, I’ll do anything once, you know, anything,” she said.

That attitude has nearly spelled disaster more than once. The two narrowly survived a capsizing when they were hurled from their canoe into treacherous rapids on the Guadalupe River near New Braunfels, Tex., in 1984. In 1985, a 200-pound bear dropped by their wilderness campsite in the Kings Canyon National Park for a mid-afternoon snack and repeatedly charged the indefatigable Seslars in a game of chicken that they won. Visiting the Wright Brothers Monument at Kitty Hawk, Lin couldn’t resist the urge to repeat Wilbur and Orville’s conquest of the skies and signed them up for hang-gliding lessons. Soaring over the North Carolina sand dunes, Lin proved a skillful flyer, but Pat, she says, “ate a lot of dirt” taking nose-dives.

When not playing at being the Indiana Joneses, Pat and Lin still have to earn a living as full-time professionals. They have to paint and sell enough artwork to meet their monthly expenses for overnight space rental, food, supplies, gas and miscellaneous other costs that turned out close to double the $1,000 they estimated five years ago.

Their paintings, priced from about $300 to $5,000, depending on the size, take from a few days to six weeks or more to complete. But, like anything in the arts, there’s no guarantee they’ll be salable. Some paintings just don’t cut it.

Even so, being able to travel, camp and spend more time on the national seashores and parks has paid dividends in relaxation and artistic growth.

“You see it in a different way,” she said. “You don’t feel rushed. You can take your time, and you can say, ‘Here’s a flower. Let’s spend some time with it.’ And you don’t have to worry about some deadline.”

They learned the hard way that not every gallery dealer is honorable. Some galleries “forget” to pay. Others fail to do what they say they are doing.

“Some take your works so that you won’t put them in a competing gallery, and then they don’t show you,” Lin said.

“We’ve had a lot of experiences like that,” Pat added. “It set us back quite a bit the first two years because of the galleries we trusted our works with.”

Now, the Seslars show their paintings in about half a dozen galleries around the country. Besides San Diego, their work is carried in Carmel, San Francisco, Naples, Fla., Stone Harbor, N.J., Charleston, S.C., and Palm Beach, Fla.

And they’ve developed artistically.

“I’ve found that painting takes more time rather than less,” Lin said. “You have peaks and plateaus. You make a lot of progress, then you paint at that level for a considerable length of time and all of a sudden some little light bulb goes on.”

Pat’s painting is also changing. And his free-lance writing career has blossomed to include a regular monthly column for Trailer Life magazine. He contributed to Lin’s book, “Painting Seascapes in Sharp Focus,” by North Light Books, and North Light has asked Pat to write a book on his subject, painting wildflowers. Eventually, he hopes to write a book about their travels.

Style Not Chic

It doesn’t bother the Seslars too much that their traditional art style is not in vogue with the critics, except that “the public gets the idea that the only kind of worthwhile art is what is reviewed by critics,” Pat said.

And the Seslars have no illusions about their choice in life styles.

The process of evaluating their lives that started them on their odyssey still goes on today.

“You keep asking yourself, well, how important is the money, earning a good salary and income and all the things that come with it versus being able to do the things we want to do,” Pat said. “You never stop asking those questions.

“There are no free rides. There’s a trade-off. You give up a lot of security to do this. You don’t get an employer-paid health plan. So we have to pay our own health insurance, with all the medical costs. We’re young and healthy now, but someday we will get old like everybody else if we’re very fortunate, and we’ll have to deal with that.”

He quotes Thoreau again: “ ‘The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.’

“What you literally spend is the days of your life for everything that you want to possess,” Pat said.

For the Seslars, time is the most important thing.

“I don’t think anybody’s really getting ahead. We’re doing pretty much what everybody else does,” he said, “but in our own way.”