Self-taught woodcarver, long a downtown fixture, uses his skills to help support himself.
Ken Baker, who is homeless, developed his skill 13 years ago, beginning at the library
Ken Baker used to be a regular at the downtown library, but he didn’t go there to read or check out books.
Baker, who is homeless, would go to the library for survival, seeking shelter from the cold.
But after a friend gave him a woodcarving kit some 13 years ago, Baker walked into the library with a new purpose: to learn.
“I went to the library and read all their carving books and a couple of sculpting books, got the idea and just started making things,” Baker, 60, said during a recent interview.
Since then, Baker has honed his skills, turning pieces of wood he finds along the Santa Fe River or buys at a lumber yard into intricate artwork he sells on the street to help support himself.
Baker said he started by carving “little bitty vases” with bouquets of flowers. As he gained confidence in his abilities, Baker taught himself to carve an array of pieces, including dolphins, ravens, santos and owls, one of his favorite subjects.
“It takes me four days to do one of these,” he said while carving an owl about the size of a Coke can.
“I get fifty bucks for them, so I’m working for what, $8.95 a day?” he said, laughing.
Although he raised his prices by $5 this year, Baker said he doesn’t charge more for his artwork because he doesn’t want to gouge his customers, many of whom live in Santa Fe or work downtown.
“Everybody can afford that,” he said about $50 for a carved owl. “You don’t have to be wealthy to get them.”
Baker, who lives in a tent in an undisclosed location, keeps his supplies in an old Padron cigar box that he said is easy to carry in his backpack. He uses wine corks as sheaths for his tools and turns lost or discarded gloves into thumb guards.
“You can buy leather thumb guards already made for you,” he said. “You get like five of them for six bucks or something like that. But it’s even cheaper for me just to find old gloves … so I just cut the fingers off of them.”
Baker has been a downtown fixture for years, listening to country music or oldies with headphones on an old radio as he quietly carves in coffee shops or benches along the street, including a bench near The New Mexican newsroom on East Marcy Street.
“I’m the boss, the landlord, the nonproperty owner,” he said, laughing. “It keeps the overhead down.”
Baker said he first came to Santa Fe in the late 1980s. An act of God brought him to the City Different.
A drifter who worked in the circus for years, Baker said he quit the circus life after a show in Southern New Mexico.
“I just got tired of it,” he said. “It’s not like I’m at the bottom of the ladder and climbing up. There is no ladder.”
Baker, who had hitchhiked to California and Florida in the past, said he stood on the highway with his thumb out.
“I had a little bit of money saved up, and this lady picked me up in a pickup. I said, ‘Ma’am, it’s not too wise to pick up a guy in the middle of nowhere.’ She goes, ‘Oh, that’s OK, you come highly advised,’” he recalled.
The driver, according to Baker, was a nun who worked at the homeless shelter in Santa Fe when it was on Don Gaspar Avenue near the state Capitol.
In addition to working security at the homeless shelter, Baker said he got a job building houses along Artist and Hyde Park roads. After living in Santa Fe for about three years, he moved to Colorado but didn’t stay long.
“Damned if you don’t come right back to Santa Fe,” he said. “It’s that vortex, man. It pulled me back, and I’ve never left it since.”
Baker said he shared an apartment with a friend and then lived on his own in an old adobe garage that had been converted into a living space.
But then his landlady raised the rent.
“I was always a little bit behind on my rent,” he said. “I couldn’t get caught up, so I said, ‘The hell with it.’ I got me a tent, and I headed to the mountains and started camping out.”
Baker said he had a difficult childhood, starting with the divorce of his parents when he was in first grade.
“I was really, really angry about that,” he said. “I’m still kind of pissed off about that. You have four kids and then all of a sudden you don’t like each other anymore, for God’s sake?”
Baker said he never had any encouragement as a youngster.
“I never once, never once, had anybody when I was a little kid sit down and ask me, ‘What do you want to do? What do you want to be when you get older?’ Nobody said that. I should’ve been cracking the books, finishing high school, get a degree in college. Maybe an art thing.”
After his parents divorced, Baker, the youngest of the family, said he and his two brothers lived with their father. His mother and his only sister moved to another state.
“My dad grew up pretty hard himself,” he said. “His dad was a hard-core alcoholic, so obviously he’s going to be a hard-core alcoholic, and that’s what destroyed the marriage.”
Baker admits that he sometimes hits the bottle hard, too.
But he said he’s happy with his life in Santa Fe. His carving and the people he meets doing it are among the reasons why.
Baker said he would like to improve his carving with some technical tips and a shop, though he said he isn’t too interested in taking any carving classes.
“I like the idea of me learning what I need to do,” he said. “I don’t want to do something the way the teacher says it should be done. This is my work. I’m going to do it the way I want to do it.”
Contact Daniel J. Chacón at 505-986-3089 or dchacon@ sfnewmexican.com. Follow him on Twitter @danieljchacon.
Ken Baker said he’s happy with his life in Santa Fe. His carving and the people he meets doing it are among the reasons why.