Tall, spindly palm trees with their crowns on fire were a familiar sight during the Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires. Burning palms became a somber visual shorthand for the fires or simply for life in L.A. in 2025.
Inside Riverside’s Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, two walls in a quiet corner are devoted to paintings of palm trees on fire.
Painted in 2021, “Three Studies of Palm Trees” by Perry Vasquez is a triptych: three tall, skinny paintings, each depicting a nearly identical palm, alight like a flare.
On the adjacent wall, “Premonition” and “2nd Premonition” by Margaret Garcia, from 2017, likewise depict the tops of two palms in flames, embers flying.
The images inspire a hushed awe, in me and in many visitors, who often remark upon what the staff calls “the fire room.”
“It’s so current, it really resonates with people. A lot of people take their time and really ruminate,” said Annie Guadarrama, the guest services manager. “Somebody from L.A. recently said, ‘That room really choked me up.’ I think there’s a catharsis there.”
The paintings, all part of the museum’s collection, were selected and arranged by María Esther Fernández, then The Cheech’s artistic director.
“What we’re calling ‘the fire room’ has been a wonderful meditative space for people,” she told me in June. “Art can not only be provocative, and get us to imagine new worlds, but it can provide solace.”
Another fan of the fire room is Cheech Marin, the collector who is the museum’s namesake.
“It’s amazing. It kind of stops people in their tracks,” Marin told me in an interview at the museum earlier this month. “They’ve never seen that many fire paintings in one place.”
Affecting an erudite tone, he continued: “Fire has many faces. And they’re all hot.”
More seriously, he said the paintings inspire emotion, including in him.
His house in Malibu, where he’s lived since 1974, has made it through two major fires: 1978’s Malibu-Agoura and 2025’s Palisades.
His recollections of the first are vivid.
Driving back after a Soul Train Awards ceremony, Marin saw a small blaze off the 101 Freeway. Arriving in Malibu, he found the fire had grown in size and raced so quickly, it had beaten him home.
He ran inside, changed out of his formal wear and got to work protecting his house. This was complicated by the fact that he’d recently broken one arm, which was in a cast.
He herded his frightened horses from the corral, then backed his cars out of the garage, which caught fire just as the last car was safe.
“I was there the whole time, man, fighting it with a garden hose with a broken arm,” Marin recalled. “I fought that fire for 12 hours. Everything I owned was in that house.”
The house survived, as do his sensory impressions of the experience.
Gas tanks exploding. Fireballs soaring over his head. Horses galloping down Pacific Coast Highway in terror.
“Nothing will ever scare me more than that. Literally everything I could see was on fire at the same time,” Marin said. “That was the first time I ever felt physical panic.”
In all, 168 houses in his neighborhood were lost.
Nearly a half-century later came the Palisades fire. This time, Marin and his wife, Natasha, were at their second home in Joshua Tree, preparing for a routine drive back to Malibu, when a friend phoned to tell them about the fire and urge them to stay put.
From the desert they watched TV news, riveted. They didn’t know for a week whether their house had burned or not. Then one night, aerial footage showed a helicopter flying over what the couple recognized as their house, intact.
“The house made it, man,” Marin said, still visibly relieved.
But not without damage. Second-story windows cracked. Awnings were scorched. The skylight on the Marins’ roof blew out. Marin marveled that embers didn’t blow inside the house through the desk-sized opening.
Machines to clear out the indoor smoke have been running for nearly six months. The Marins have visited a few times and expect to live there again soon.
Their house and a neighbor’s were the only ones on their block to survive.
As for their insurance company, Marin used the spoonerism “shellout falter” to describe the negotiations: “When they have to shell out, they falter.”
In all, 720 houses in Malibu burned. Marin said the “capricious nature” of fire was evident in how houses burned or were skipped over, seemingly at random.
Back to the fire paintings. The three by Vasquez were owned by Hugh Davies, an art-world friend and mentor of Marin’s, and donated to The Cheech in his honor. The two by Garcia were bought from the artist by Marin.
Marin related with a laugh: “She made that one big palm tree, burning. I said, ‘I really like that, I’ll take it.’ So she said, ‘Oh, Cheech likes it, I’ll paint another one.’”
Several other paintings nearby, by Garcia and Carlos Almaraz, continue the fire theme, overtly or subtly.
The effect isn’t morbid. Rather, the art hints at the commingled beauty and terror of forces outside our control.
“There’s a warmth there. It feels alive,” Guadarrama, the guest services manager, said of the fire room.
When visitors ask if the paintings are new, Guadarrama explains that the art predates the January fires. Palm trees on fire, she said, is a sight the L.A. artists have seen all their lives.
“It was a phase that people were going through,” Marin said of the paintings by Garcia, Almaraz and Vasquez. “It was kind of iconic California, and especially Chicano California, because they have a lot of those palms in those neighborhoods, you know.”
With a cushioned bench in the middle of the fire room, visitors can sit and take in one wall’s paintings, pivot and see more, then do the same for the last.
“It sets off a lot of emotions,” Marin said. “That’s why they put those loungers there, so people could sit down and check it out.”
What is it about those fire paintings that appeals to him?
“I’m very respectful of fire, having been through two big ones. I get scared by them, but I get intrigued at the same time, you know?” Marin mused.
“It’s a very primal experience when you’re in a fire and everything you can see is on fire at the same time. It’s like, whew.”
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and, whew, Wednesday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.