ART : Escalante Rides Different Wave

Nearly every day as a teen-ager, Greg Escalante would hit the beach the moment the sun came up, surf for an hour or two before school, then head back for more the minute classes let out.

In pursuit of the perfect wave in his well-worn wet suit, he eventually became the National Scholastic Surfing Assn.’s No. 1 surfer. He is even married to a “surf team stat girl,” says wife Kristin, now a law student.

Escalante, now 36, still surfs often, despite a full-time job as a Treasury bond trader. If the swells are high, he finds a way to go out. He typically makes two or three trips a week.

In recent years, however, he’s been transfixed by something else, something that commands even more of his time and attention. These days, he says, he’s more “obsessed” with collecting contemporary art than he ever was with catching waves. He’s made virtual art galleries of his Long Beach home and of the Irvine office where he works for Foresight Management Capital Inc., a brokerage firm.

“I tend to do things overboard . . (but) art is the heroin of collecting,” said Escalante, who also stockpiles vintage silk ties and small plastic dinosaurs.

His avocation is indeed like a “disease,” says Kristin Escalante, who concedes that her husband can be compulsive about things. “It’s a little scary to see all this art coming in” after a buying binge, she says, well aware that each painting or photograph can carry a hefty price tag.

Three years into his new hobby, Escalante has an impressive collection of about 100 works, ranging from a wall-size John Baldessari print to a suite of William Wegman photographs. He stores most of what he can’t display, but is still sending the ever-increasing overflow to relatives. He visits galleries--mostly in Los Angeles--up to three times a week, can talk nonstop about favorite artists, and estimates that last year he spent about 80% of his income on art. (The rent on their house is low, he says).

But beyond feeding his own enjoyment, Escalante’s rabid infatuation has benefited the Laguna Art Museum, where he has recently begun his second year as a board member. A testimony to the impact he’s had is the museum’s current show, “I Thought California Would Be Different: New Work in the Permanent Collection,” which Escalante, more than any other trustee, helped make possible, museum officials say.

The show, which consists of recent acquisitions, counters the optimistic palm tree- and tan-line myths of California bliss with of a darker, grittier view of life in the Golden State. The works are by 15 artists, most from Los Angeles, and many of them younger and lesser-known to the art establishment. They incorporate idioms from such pop culture enclaves as surfing, punk rock, graffiti and underground comic books.

Not coincidentally, it’s the sort of art Escalante likes most. He owns works by many of the exhibit’s artists, donated two paintings to the show, had a hand in coaxing about a dozen other Southland collectors to donate works and helped find underwriting for the 10-week exhibit, museum officials said.

“Greg has been by far the most active trustee” involved with this exhibit “and a really important asset to the museum,” director Charles Desmarais said.

Exhibit curator Bolton Colburn, who met Escalante surfing years ago, noted that he donated the one painting in the show by Robert Williams of Los Angeles. Several of Williams’ bad-dream, comic-booklike paintings are included in “Helter Skelter,” a similarly themed but much larger exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. Escalante, who also donated a painting by Orange County artist Mike Parker, owns five works by Williams, with whom he has become good friends.

“Without Greg, we never would have gotten the Williams--nobody wants to let them go,” said Colburn, who, as the museum’s collections curator, asked Escalante in 1989 to make his first cash contribution to the museum. Shortly after that, Escalante was asked to become a trustee.

Indeed, Escalante, who now sits on the board’s collections and executive committees, fulfills two key trustee obligations: giving and getting--that is, contributing cash or art or persuading others to do so.

But Escalante differs from many trustees in that he’s been getting from people in his age range--some of whom had no previous interest in art--thereby helping to cultivate a constituency that’s less involved in the museum world.

Actor Nicolas Cage partly funded the exhibit because, Escalante says, he very straightforwardly asked the actor to make the gift. Escalante knew, having met Cage through artist Sandow Birk, a friend and one of the artists featured in the exhibit, that he and Cage had similar taste in art.

The show’s other underwriter, Charlie Miller, is one of the Escalante’s bona fide art converts. Miller is now a budding collector as well as a museum supporter.

“I met the guy surfing in El Salvador a couple years ago,” said Miller, a 33-year-old real estate agent from Los Angeles. “I had never been exposed to art before at all. But we started going surfing here and going to art shows and I just started buying stuff I liked and that was it.”

Miller also helped the museum purchase more than 150 prints produced at Self-Help Graphics, a respected East Los Angeles print shop. Also funding that acquisition was Rene Molina, an office mate of Escalante at Foresight and another collector who owes much of his interest in it to Escalante.

“Greg got me to commission Sandow Birk to do a painting of Tommy’s,” a popular 24-hour hamburger stand that’s become part of the Los Angeles lore, Molina said. “I grew up in L.A. and used to hang out there after late-night outings. (Someone) showed the painting to the owner and he liked it so much, he had one made.”

Not surprisingly, Escalante’s taste in art is rooted in the areas of popular culture related to surfing and comic books. Therein lies the story of how his passion to amass began.

During a recent tour of his home collection, the lanky, effusive Escalante liberally tosses out such surf-turf jargon as totally, cool and gnarly. He was born in Los Angeles, where his father owned a sign business and his mother was a homemaker. He attended Los Alamitos High School (when he wasn’t catching waves), then Cal State Long Beach (when he wasn’t catching waves).

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art, specializing in ceramics. Nevertheless, he admits he was largely indifferent to art. The only artist who piqued his interest was Rick Griffin, who helped define a genre of surfer comics art in the ‘60s and whose graphics Escalante regularly saw in Surfer magazine. (Griffin died last year.)

Then one day, long after he’d left an uncreative job in a ceramics factory and begun trading bonds, Escalante saw a Williams painting reproduced on the cover of Thrasher, a skateboard magazine.

“I just went, ‘Wow, wow, wow . . . this is exactly what somebody should be doing; this is making art exciting again,” Escalante said. Art, he said, “had gotten too intellectual.”

Williams, who illustrated underground comic books (and co-founded Zap Comix in his early days), says his vigorously colored paintings are packed with “gratuitous sex and violence and exploitative action and theatrics and overdone melodrama--anything to feed your eye, sometimes at the expense of virtue.” The Thrasher cover was a bit milder than all that--still, it depicts a boy holding a sawed-off rat torso by the tail, a sweet-looking little girl standing beside him.

“If you were a kid growing up in California and liked all the things I liked, you knew where this guy was coming from instantly,” said Escalante, breaking into the high-speed speech he uses whenever he talks about such subjects. “In his paintings I saw my surfing experiences, all the comic-book cartoons I liked as a kid, the (‘60s) psychedelic movement, and all these things that little boys get a charge out of, like collecting bugs or setting off firecrackers.”

After he got Williams’ phone number from surfer buddy Colburn, Escalante called the artist, went to his home and purchased the rat painting, thereby joining the growing number of collectors who covet Williams’ work. At the moment, about 190 people are on a waiting list for new Williams paintings, the artist said.

Escalante and his wife had bought a few artworks here and there before, but now they were hooked.

Works by several other artists in the museum show are represented in Escalante’s collection. Among them are pieces by Birk, Kim Abeles, Chaz Bojorquez, Russell Crotty, Gregory Gibbs, Ilene Segalove and Mark Heresy. He also owns works by contemporary-art luminaries Bruce Nauman, Jonathan Borofsky, Frank Romero and others, and he’s got paintings by Griffin and a surfboard adorned with bizarre bug-eyed caricatures by Williams.

When buying their work, Escalante’s modus operandi is to deal with artists directly, as he did with Williams.

Getting to know artists, rather than buying through galleries, is a big part of what makes collecting so appealing to him, Escalante said.

Just as he knows the art world has changed his life, Escalante knows he’s had an impact, particularly through the museum exhibit. Many of its artists have never been included in a major museum exhibit or in a permanent collection. But, as fellow trustees and others have said, he does what he does simply because he likes it.

“There’s a lot of great younger artists out there, and it may take 10 or 15 years for them to get a museum show,” he said, “but it is so great to get a glimpse of them now when they’re doing their most vigorous stuff, when their imaginations are working full blast.”