Egan, the artist who lost work for his upcoming exhibition, lived and worked out of the house he grew up in on Bienveneda Avenue in Pacifica. He described seeing the fire from his window while his wife was in the shower. “There was a little plume of smoke and when she came out of the shower it was 30 football fields wide,” he said. “Within an hour the sky was black.”
Sending his wife and children ahead of him, Egan initially stayed behind to try to arrange trucks to rescue his paintings. But his attempt quickly proved fruitless and ill-advised: the whole neighborhood was running around him to evacuate. When he returned days later, Egan said, his house “had burned to the ground.”
Many Pacific Palisades residents have lost valuable artifacts and family heirlooms. Some of Los Angeles’ wealthiest collectors are concentrated on the west side of the city, including Pacific Palisades.
As the wildfire swept across the lawn Tuesday night, a man rode his bicycle and delivered two paintings to a nearby NBC Los Angeles reporter, Robert Kovacic, for safekeeping. “There’s a fire in the backyard,” the cyclist chimed in A video Which has gone viral on social media. “I’m out of here.”
Famous Altadena artists whose homes or studios are known to have been damaged or destroyed by fire Paul McCarthywho lived in Altadena near his daughter, Mara, a gallerist, and his son, Damon, an artist. “This is the house I grew up in,” Mara said in a telephone interview from a friend’s home 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. Houser & Worth in London.
The artist Ross Simoni He said he lived just down the street from Paul McCarthy. “We lost our house, my studio, all my art forever,” Simoni said by telephone from the comfort of Interstate 5. He was moving with his wife, infant and dog to live with his father in Northern California. “It’s so scary, looking at it now. I have an aerial shot of our neighborhood and six blocks in every direction, there’s nothing.