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In the spring of 2012, I visited an artist in Los Angeles who, in the course of our conversation about her work, mentioned a fire that had destroyed her studio about a year earlier, and an ongoing lawsuit over responsibility for the blaze. She told me about several other artists who had endured similar disasters, whose stories people had shared with her following her own loss. Curious about how an event like this could impact an artist’s work, I began to gather such stories too.
My book, On Fire, was published in 2016, a slim volume that brought together the testimonies of 10 artists who had lost their studios to fires. Not all were based in Los Angeles, and not all of them knew of each other, but it seemed that they were a community of sorts, an involuntary club of grim distinction. After the book came out, fire stories continued to drift my way. Then, on January 8 this year, the club’s membership suddenly expanded in the space of a few hours.
For the artists in Los Angeles who lost not only their studios but also their homes, their communities, the parks and shops and bars and restaurants they used to frequent — not to mention, in most cases, a fundamental sense of belonging — there is little solace to be gleaned from the long, sad history of artists who have seen their life’s work go up in flames. There is no artist’s manual for post-disaster recovery.
There were, however, illuminating patterns that emerged through my discussions with artists about their various experiences. While I had expected their lamentations to focus on material things that had burned — their newest paintings, or their pivotal, early work, or the things they’d collected, or their materials, or even their favourite tools — what seemed to hurt most was the loss of space in which to create. While most, out of necessity, store a lot of stuff, artists’ studios are foremost sites of potential. They are hard-won, too. For young artists just setting out, it can take such grit and graft to afford even the most modest studio; for more established artists, creating the perfect space in which to work can be among their greatest creative acts.
In 2013, the LA-based sculptor and photographer Anthony Pearson spent four months renovating a former garage which would be his new studio, ideally fitted out to his specifications. When he and an assistant finally transferred his work from his old studio, they parked their rented van inside the new space, too exhausted to unload. Around 11pm that evening, Pearson was at home, reading the LA Times on his computer, when he saw a breaking news item about a structure fire in the neighbourhood where his new studio was located. He recognised the aerial photograph immediately.
Pearson was raised in Pacific Palisades and, after I interviewed him for my book, he moved back there with his family. In the immense fire that obliterated most of the neighbourhood and the hills around it this January, his home was miraculously spared. But it was the loss of the place, of the community and its history, that was devastating beyond anything he had experienced before.
This is true for many of the victims of last month’s fires, and it is why I have been reluctant to associate my old book with the still unfolding tragedy. The painter Catherine Howe, for instance, seemed to relish telling me how, in 2011, linseed oil-soaked rags had sparked a fire in the attic studio of her farmhouse in upstate New York. Firemen saved her home; she built a detached, larger studio on the property and her painting has since gone from strength to strength. The Dutch artist Erik Van Lieshout suffered a studio fire, likely caused in a similar way, but he made the paintings again, “fresher, better” than before. The Portland-based painter Kate Ruggeri experienced “a sense of artistic rebirth” following the loss of her studio.
There are historical precedents, too. In 1946, Arshille Gorky tried, in vain, to douse the flames consuming his Connecticut studio; the event may have contributed to his suicide two years later, but not before he told his wife that he felt “a new freedom from the past.” The painter Alfred Leslie was mourning the death of his friend Frank O’Hara in 1966 when his Manhattan studio burned down, eradicating much of his life’s work. For months, he was paralysed with grief. When he began to paint again, the series that emerged — The Killing Cycle, memorialising O’Hara’s death — was his most powerful work.
It would be miraculous if the scores of artists who lost studios or homes in the Palisades or in Altadena felt such a rebirth now, as they deal with the Environmental Protection Agency and toxic ash cleanup and insurance claims and Airbnb bookings and repurchasing all the items they never thought much about but which they now realise are essential for functioning day to day. But maybe one day they will.
In the meantime, we must support them as best we can. Aside from offering material and economical assistance, we all should listen to what these artists have to tell us, to hear the new stories that will emerge from this tragedy. They will be unlike any we’ve heard before.