My pastels present boundaryless plains un-moored by perspective. They are attended to by a bird who oversees a world it could fly far away from.

Some center on L.A.’s 2025 wild fire disaster, merging together elements drawn from its places, landscapes, and history, including fragments from its film industry.

In January, when I went to see tectonic fault lines a few hours north of Los Angeles, fire broke out.
Driving back into the city the night sky above Topanga Canyon glowed red.

I hunkered down for days before returning to New York. It all felt like 9/11 all over again to me.
My pictures from that era floated shadowy figures of mythic gods, poems, and glyphic words like the Afghani for “brotherly love,” in life-sized compositions.

And just like in downtown NYC in 2001, Pasadena’s skies snowed small pieces of ash down on us.

I watched the news and stole its imagery.  As California was altered forever in a matter of hours, as households and lives were destroyed, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, America’s symbol for “home,” sat safely inside a museum box. 

Large Pastels

— Review from the VILLAGE STAR REVIEW; JUNE 2025; by LEE KLEIN

The rolling hills and mountains of Southern California the biosphere the range of climates from desert to snow covered peaks roamed by mountain goats, in one cable car ride the soaring mountains over the sea the vertigo of a place prone to earthquakes, fire, floods, mudslides, a virtual sim city real time life on a movie set, in a movie setting.

What inspired David Hockney, the golden sunshine the movement of topographical features like hyper-suggestive outlines in a Howard Hodgkin painting, this is where the experimental filmmaker and painter Lili White found herself witness to its landscape and its human encroachments during violently transforming wildfires of 2025.

This is hot color this is hot hot hotness the outlines of images like waves spreading over other pictorial terrains, fire in a sizzling blaze along the seams of our imagination.

Working in pastels, White captures the sizzling oozing neon of this place in time: birds and cars move around and through blazes, oil derricks, bridges, flaming flamingo cartoons, a whole range of wildly divergent colors.

Here White is like a canary in coal mine, a canary in a gold mine, in the land of untold riches, ablaze in a vehicular grand slalom coursing through lighting both artificial and natural under circumstances unexpected and previously unknown, which bespeaks the world of Ginza lights in Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID. An endgame for it is just within a hair’s breath of an apocalypse.

Small Pastels