Artist Paints Lost Homes for LA Wildfire Survivors

Ruth Askren's childhood home in Palisades, California made it through the devastating 2025 wildfires, but thousands of her neighbors weren't so lucky. The 72-year-old artist felt survivor's guilt watching her community burn, so she picked up her paintbrush.

Askren joined Homes in Memoriam, a collective of artists creating free home portraits for families who lost everything in the fires. She works from old photographs to recreate every detail: the way tree branches cast shadows across a facade, the warm glow from an upstairs window, the exact shade of yellow paint on a front door.

"For me, it was a matter of feeling really compelled to do something," Askren told the LA Times. "This is what I do. I'm a painter. This is what I can do to help people cope with their loss in the smallest of ways."

Each painting takes hours of careful work. Askren studies photo after photo, building a composite image that captures not just what the house looked like, but what it felt like to live there.

When she painted a yellow house with a sloping roof for the Vaziri family, something unexpected happened. "Painting this special house gave me a sense of how it was like a living thing," she shared on Instagram. "Its personality came through. It felt like an entity that could morph according to the needs of its dwellers."

Sunny's Take

The families who receive these paintings are moved to tears, but Askren says the process has become therapy for her too. Creating these portraits helps her process the massive loss her community suffered, even as her own home stood untouched.

Each brushstroke is an act of remembrance, a way of saying these homes mattered and the lives lived within them still do. The paintings can't replace what was lost, but they preserve something precious: the memory of a place that was once filled with love, laughter, and life.

"These homes and others will live on in the paintings created by loving hands, sharing the joy and the grief," Askren said, capturing the bittersweet beauty of turning loss into lasting art.