Los Angeles Artists Mourn as Their Studios and Artworks Go Up in Smoke

Egan, the artist who lost the works for his upcoming exhibition, lived and worked out of the house he grew up in on Bienveneda Avenue in the Pacific Palisades. He described watching the fire spread from his window while his wife was in the shower. “There was a little tiny plume of smoke and by the time she got out of the shower the plume was 30 football fields big,” he said. “Within the hour the sky was black.”

Sending his wife and children out ahead of him, Egan initially stayed behind to try to arrange for trucks to rescue his paintings. But his effort quickly proved fruitless and ill-advised: the entire neighborhood was rushing to evacuate around him. When he returned days later, Egan said, his house had “burned to the ground.”

Many Pacific Palisades residents have lost treasured artworks and family heirlooms. Some of the wealthiest collectors in Los Angeles are concentrated on the West Side of the city, which includes Pacific Palisades.

On Tuesday night as the wildfire swept across the lawns, a man hopped onto his bicycle and handed two paintings to a nearby NBC Los Angeles reporter, Robert Kovacik, for safekeeping. “Backyard’s on fire,” the bicyclist said in a video that has gone viral on social media. “I’m out of here.”

Among the celebrated artists in Altadena whose homes or studios known to have been damaged or destroyed by the fire was Paul McCarthy, who lived in Altadena near his daughter, Mara, a gallerist, and his son, Damon, also an artist. “It’s the home I grew up in,” Mara said in a telephone interview from a friend’s house in Silver Lake. “Our whole family, our whole community, is devastated.” As a result of the fire, she added, her father had postponed his upcoming show at Hauser & Wirth in London.

The artist Ross Simonini said he lived right down the street from Paul McCarthy. “We lost our home, my studio, all my art from — ever,” Simonini said by telephone from a rest stop off Interstate 5. He was on his way with his wife, infant and dog to stay with his father in Northern California. “It’s so horrific, seeing it now. I have an aerial shot from our neighborhood and six blocks in every direction, there’s nothing.”