Artist displays her works saved from Palisades Fire
When Krishna Thangavelu saw a large tree on fire near her home, she quickly made the decision to evacuate.
Grabbing as many personal items as possible, one of the few things she packed in her Honda Civic was a collection of her artworks.
From the eight years since she started painting landscapes, flowers, and other nature-focused pieces, only a tenth of those survived. The rest were turned into a pile of ash and rubble.
Thangavelu’s home, which used to oversee the Pacific Ocean, was one of the thousands of homes burned to the ground during the Palisades Fire in January.
“I was fairly confident that this one would also be put out,” she said, as she was used to hearing reports of fires that were quickly extinguished throughout her time living there.
But as more than 23,000 acres burned, losing her home was a reality she now faced like thousands of others impacted by the devastation.
“I could see the Super Scoopers, the helicopters picking up water, but my entire complex burned,” she said.
A few weeks ago at The Main in Old Town Newhall, she held a special reception for her art exhibition displaying the very paintings she managed to pack up in her car when she evacuated her home. Her art will remain on display through July 21.
The lineup of over a dozen paintings, which she named “Angel Art,” stood as a testament to resilience and the tribulations she endured during those months, learning to navigate her new life.
“These pieces were literally hanging up on my wall,” she said as she pointed to a few. “They’re all living life after death. They’re just normal paintings, but when you realize they survived sure death by fire, they went to heaven. They survived,” she said.
Now wearing a “Palisades Strong,” necklace that she never takes off, the visual artist is temporarily staying in Riverside with her sister, while she finds a new place with a large space where she can create new pieces, she said.
Before the canvasses were on display for her “Angel Art” exhibition, they were put away for months in her niece’s closet.
A lot of her inspiration for her work came from the very things that were in her home, like the pots of flowers she purchased from Trader Joe’s, or the multicolored sunsets she witnessed daily.
“What I miss the most is just playing,” she said, when asked about what she missed about creating art. She has not made a new painting since the fires.
“It was the only time I had where my mind slowed down, and calmed down,” Thangavelu said. “Some people are like, ‘I’m going to get a house or an apartment’” but for her she has tunnel vision on a studio, she said, because art is more than therapy for her, it’s a way for her to “settle into the universe.”
Moving forward, she hopes to make the exhibition a traveling one, so she can go to different places to share her story, and to remind people of how much the wildfires impacted thousands.
As she happily greeted people into the venue, she gave away prints of her painting titled “The First Sunrise,” with red and yellow hues.
“This is sort of symbolic of everything that we lost,” she said. “I think it would make our town happy to see the ocean and sunsets again.”
