Spotlight: Saratoga Oil Painting Instructor Stefan Baumann

"When other kids were playing football, I was listening to Chopin and Brahms,” Stefan Baumann told People in 1980.

The pop-culture magazine was interviewing the then-18-year-old Lake Tahoe resident and avant-garde student about recent sales of his oil paintings, which included one that fetched up to $12,000, the equivalent of $32,000 in today’s economy.

Those paintings as well as others would eventually find their way into America’s leading art collectors—the Rockefellers, the Annebergs and, even, a U.S. President, Ronald Reagan.

Although his dream to become a “household name” among the mainstream may not have entirely come to fruition, Baumann certainly has carved a niche for himself.

Born to business-savvy parents, his father, a Swiss native, owned a chain of bakeries in the Tahoe region while his mother was a homemaker and a deli owner.

Originally focused on piano and planning to become a professional musician, Baumann found success as a landscape artist when, at the age of 11, sold his first painting for $35.

The brush and canvas immediately consumed his life.

As a teenager, he would spend more than 500 hours working on a single painting.

It was clear to himself as well as to his peers where his career path was headed. His friends were enthralled when he unabashedly drove his new Mercedes-Benz into the high school parking lot, which he had bought with his recent earnings.

Leaving the mountains for the ivory tower, Baumann was awarded a scholarship to Stanford University.

While continuing to paint and studying art history, Baumann discovered a second passion, teaching.

Starting off as a tutor, he moved to San Francisco and began teaching classes. While his classes expanded in size, his focus remained on landscape painting, with particular emphasis on national parks and coastal terrain.

Baumann became so popular in the art scene that he eventually was approached by executives at PBS and was offered to host a weekly television program, The Grand View America’s National Parks through the Eyes of an Artist, which continues to air nationwide. 

Eventually, Baumann left the Bay Area and returned to rural Northern California. His home is, appropriately, nestled in the state’s most beautiful mountainous landscapes—Lassen, Shasta and Trinity National Parks.

When he’s not teaching in Mt. Shasta or Redding, or working on his art, which he characterizes as “elegant and mysterious, exciting and bold,” the PBS host makes the bimonthly trek to Saratoga on Monday nights. 

For more info on Baumann's classes at the Joan Pisani Community Center, click here.