Five Paintings

his grandmother, a professional artist based in Malibu, California. Over five decades, she amassed an impressive body of work, paintings, sketches, drawings, illustrations. She was also an avid art collector, and then she lost all of it. The horribly destructive wildfires then engulfed nearly two million acres of California that year, well almost all of it. Honestly, if it wasn't from my neighbor, I would be dead. It was one o'clock in the morning.

The phone rang, and everything was going fast. The phone lines were going down, the electric lines we're going down. And she said, the fire has jumped the freeway. We haven't much time, and that's when I packed everything, and she's absolutely right. We didn't have much time. When I got down to the end of the driveway or the road. There was just blazing. That's my grandma. Her name is Yvonne Scherbach, and she's been a professional artist and educator

her entire adult life. She's worked and lived most of that life in the mountains just east of Malibu, And as you just heard, she was forced to evacuate her home a few years ago, barely escaping the so called Woolsey wildfires. When I found out what had happened, I couldn't leave it. I had grown up visiting that house every summer. It was a magical place. The house looked like an art gallery. Every wall had paintings on it. Many of them, of course, were mine, but I collected,

of course, I collected. I collected from other illustrators, other artists. I had paintings, drawings everywhere, and they were delightful. It was a wonderful environment to live in. More than anything, that house was a testament to everything my grandma had achieved over five decades of work. Just looking around it was easy to see what a successful career she had had. As she told me, she knew very early on in life that art was her calling. I don't think there's

a choice there. I think one is born to do that, and I think that's true of musicians, it's true of writers. You don't have an Aha moment. It's just what you're born to do, and quite frankly, you will do anything to do it. As a young adult, my grandma studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and quickly discovered what she was capable of. When I graduated, all I knew is that I wanted to be an illustrator.

That's what I'd studied. And to tell you the truth, I had a job before I even graduated, and almost immediately I was illustrating books for children. I illustrated for ten years two books a year for Scholastic, The Math Monsters. As an illustrator, really, what I was really doing as

characters storytelling. That's what illustrators do, is tell stories. When I saw the movie called Ms Potter with Renee Zelwerger about the life of Beatrix Potter, I laughed in the theater when she started talking to her characters, her book characters, because then I didn't feel like such an idiot. I used to do the same thing. I used to actually talk them, say now you know what, Babs, this doesn't go when something wasn't going right with the drawing. I mean,

it's very funny. You get connected to the very things that you're drawing. I did two books a year for ten years, and sixty illustrations each book. That's a lot of drawing, and then that's a lot of time with those monsters. So in between all of that, I found time to also do my own work as an artist. Because in every artist, there lives two artists. The one that has to make a living to pay the bills, and the other one that likes to do what it

likes to do. Unless you are lucky enough to be financially independent, to be able to shuffle around in your barn stocks sandals, smoking goal was cigarettes and up in the studio, which does not happen anymore. You have to be very diversified as an artist. You have to be able to do many different things on top of creating art. My grandma spent much of her life teaching art. She taught illustration at the Art Center College of Design, Finder

a college in various high schools in the region. And as busy as she was, my grandma still found plenty of time to make her own art. I think it's because I lived in a very beautiful area. I really loved doing landscape, sea scape, nature because that was the environment I lived in. And I love just stepping outside, breathing the fresh air, sitting down and capturing it, seeing the sunrise, seeing the sunset, seeing the grove of oaks.

My grandma finally retired from teaching in the spring of that summer was particularly hot and dry, and in November the fires began in southern California, later called the Wolsey Fire. The flames ignited on November eight and quickly ravage Simi Valley that dozens of homes have burned in various areas this afternoon, including in Bell Canyon, in Agora, in oak Park, and in the Malibu Lake area. Fire crews telling us that they are not able to do damage assessment yet.

At first, my grandma thought she was safe in her tucked away corner of Malibu, but early one morning that all changed. As you heard at the beginning, she got a call from her neighbor saying it was time to evacuate. The fires were imminent. When the fire was raging towards me, there was not a lot of time. I took what was the oldest, the most irreplaceable, and the smallest. I took a Louisy cart. It's an etching from the nineteen hundreds.

A couple of heroes she Gaze, which I was seventeenth century, and a very old oil painting that I have that's nineteenth century. And then a couple of small things of painting I had done in Salt, quote Scotland, and a photo from Salt because Scotland. These things were all small.

There was one funny thing I did do. As I was getting into my truck, I looked up at my art studio and I said, you know what, I just bought a bunch of very expensive, nice sable brushes back in England last year, and I'm not leaving them, So flames be damned. I went up into my studio, opened the drawers and grabbed handfuls of brushes. Everything else I had to leave, but I got my brushes. As long as I had my brushes, all was well. I grabbed those things. I put my animals in their animal carriers.

I had three changes of clothes. I grabbed a box that I thought had some important papers in it, got on my truck back down the driveway, got down to the end of the road and was horrified to see that to my left, which is where I was planning on going, there were thirty foot flames, so I had to turn right and that was it. There was no communication for quite a while about what had happened, and I kept going on to Google Earth and going, oh, looked,

everything's fine. The house it's still standing. Well, the Google Earth wasn't accurate. Finally, my next door neighbor she said, I don't know how to tell you this, but everything's gone. So house was gone, art studio was gone, guesthouse was gone, everything was gone. All I have to say is you have a sense of disbelief for a while. You just

can't believe that that's possible. It happened November nine, and yet wasn't until December one that we were able to get back up there, and when we arrived and saw it gone, it's just it's just surreal, that's all I can tell you. It's surreal. And at that moment, what you're glad is that you're alive. The animals are alive, and what are you going to do now? What you've lost doesn't even really come to you, and it's only afterwards,

and I do mean long afterwards. A year afterwards, we start going, oh my god, I've got no photographs of my children, I've got no artwork from what I've done for thirty years. Still you come back to square one of well, I've got my life, I've got my animals, and life goes on. I left my own art work that I can never replace. I could never redo that, and artwork done by friends and illustrators and from patients

at the hospital. It's just heartbreaking, it really is. I've been able to go on the internet and find some of the books that I illustrated and have been able to get, but most of them are either too expensive because they've become collectors items, or they're out of print. Some of them were two hundred dollars a piece. Now these are things that originally sold for like six dollars a piece. One of them was fifteen. Now, Dad, they go,

oh my god, why. But I was able to buy a few of them back and thumbing through them, Oh my god, they bring back memories of oh yeah, I remember doing that. It was amazing to me that my grandma instinctively grabbed the works that she did to say, from the fire. I asked her to explain what they meant to her and describe them for me. It just so happens that on one of the walls in my bedroom that's where the Louisy cart was and the two heroes she Gaze, So there were things I woke up

to every morning. So there's not only a familiarity to them, but there's also they happened to be two artists that I really love. The two hero she gaze our landscapes their Japanese prints, so they're sky, horizon, water, and the cart is a defiant young woman looking to a mask that is hanging on the wall, and the mask is clearly to be the devil. So perhaps there is some

symbolism to those three things. The other ones the little oil paintings I believe it or not of the Bronx City Park, but it was done in so the Bronx City Park looks like the country. I doubt that it looks like that now, and it was just always a little peaceful thing to look at. The only painting I saved in my own was from Salt Coats, Scotland when I was there, and a photograph from there. My husband Norman, was from there and I always take my watercolors with

me and I travel. It's a landscape of the west coast of Scotland and the photograph is some young boys that are crabbing. They're catching crabs in the harbor. I then asked my grandma what she thought would eventually happen with these keepsakes and priceless works of art. Well, you don't, I don't know. I guess that depends upon my daughter and my grandson, and I hope that they will look into who the artists were or look into the places

that were. That is what art does for us. For an example, if you go to the Crocker Museum up in Sacramento, there's these amazing, huge, massive paintings of Yosemite that we're done by Barnstadt and a couple of artists who were hired by the American governments. Two document to what the new newly acquired national parks looked like. Because this was pre photography. There's also books about even where I live in Malibu, about what it looked like at the time that the artist did it, and it doesn't

look like that any more. So it's a document of what was and I guess in a hope, let's say, in the Bronx City Park, is an awareness to protect things. I vividly remember those paintings that my grandma saved as a child. I would sometimes stare at them for hours when I would visit that house in Malibu. But there were so many more of them back then. As my grandma said, it was like an art gallery or a museum. And it's one of my family's biggest tragedies that I'll

never see any of it again. My grand no doubt feels that more than anyone. I certainly never never imagined such devastation at the time of something like a fire or a hurricane, or a flood or god knows what I have to tell you, you are not in the best state of mind. And even if I had been in the most sharpest width at that time, I don't know what more I could have physically taken and put into my vehicle. In retrospect, I can think of lots of things, because our things are not just things. There

are things that remind us of something or someone. They bring back a memory when you pass them on. Your hope is that someone else sees something in them. Also. Yvonne Sherbock is a California based artist and retired educator. She now lives in Ventura, California, and despite losing fifty years of her art, she continues to paint and create more every day. This episode of Ephemeral was written by Trevor Young. I'm produced with Max and Alex Williams and

Matt Frederick. Next time on Ephemeral. The only time in my life where I'm truly mindful and truly present in the moment is when I'm listening outside. I live so much of my life planning three or four or five steps ahead, trying to be as efficient as possible, trying to be as productive as possible. That prevents you from living in a moment. When I'm out there, I can just be, which is such a relief. It's almost like

I'm sleeping with a few others sensory systems working. It also just brings me into contact with the coolest events and organisms that I wouldn't see otherwise if I wasn't just sitting and listening and being patient. Support Ephemeral by recommending an episode, leaving a review, or dropping this a line at Ephemeral Show for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and learn more at ephemeral dot show