Fire This Time - Sylvia Winstein UCLA Art Show 2025This is my second year showing at the UCLA Faculty Center. As part of the Art for Fire Victims program two of my pieces were selected as donations to victim families: Tahiti Sunset Clouds, and Sunset at SW Balcony. For my display I feature three pieces related to the fire and healing from the tragedy: Time to Leave, Day Five, and Kinkakuji Temple.

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Time to Leave.

I took this photo at 5:30pm on January 7, 2025. It scared me deeply. I’m positioned on our sidewalk at the north end of our house in Santa Monica. The fire is somewhere north of the Riviera Country Club, which I think of as our final firebreak. If fire crosses that expanse only active firefighting will spare our neighborhood from the devastation already so real on Day 1. We lived in an evacuation-warning area, not mandatory evacuation. The mandatory zone started 1.5 blocks north. What I thought were the essential items may have been only half of what I needed in paperwork alone. I had dismissed the idea of packing our art works and fine crafts. The too cavalier joke was, “Honey, do we have room for the Sam Maloof chair?”

I did not confront the prospect of losing everything accumulated in this house for over 60 years. Photos and files were in the cloud, but all the rest could be lost. I knew I could not sleep with the fire looming. What if the alarms didn’t work? What if the power went out despite our batteries.

The decision to evacuate was triggered at such a level below the worst-case scenario that I did not confront the worst case. A hotel in Manhattan Beach provided a good night’s sleep. Returning the next morning we found the wind patterns had spared us from even the smell of smoke. Almost no ash fell on our property. Many people we know faired far worse. In the afternoon I received an automated call from our insurers that their fire-fighting crews were in the area covering hot spot near protected homes. I only vaguely recalled something of this provision before that reminder. It was very welcome. I could sleep.

For the first three months I would only show the photo to people who understood the tragedy. The image still scares me, and I explicitly excluded it from my solo show at TAG – The Artists Gallery that opened April 23. I felt compelled to print one for myself. It fell outside the rule of “art I want to live with every day.” The first wave of emotional impact comes from the memory of being there. Another wave of impact comes from the juxtaposition of the suburban tranquility with well-kept gardens and lawns, with a broad, clear sidewalk traversing the image – garden lights leading the way almost directly into the fire driven by 80-mile-per-hour winds. As a composition “Time to Leave” shares many characteristics with my sunset scenes. The safe luminosity from their 93-million-mile source contrasts with the fierce immediacy of fire ball. The distant ocean horizon in my sunsets contrasts with the tree line separating us from the Riviera. The shoreline or causeway contrasts with the gentile sidewalk still moving the viewers eyes along a path.

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Day Five

On Saturday the fire shifted to canyons east of the Riviera so that the expanse of well-tended lawn offered no protection. It wasn’t as scary, partly because of no obvious flame, but “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Partly the intense orange color drew me in. I do not know the fuel or retardant that produced that hue, but it makes a striking contrast with the blue of the sky and the greenery below. This is taken from the balcony outside the master bedroom, not far the sidewalk in “Time to Leave.” This image doesn’t scare me nearly as much. By Day Five everyone was a veteran.

Partly the intense orange color drew me in. I do not know the fuel or retardant that produced that hue, but it makes a striking contrast with the blue of the sky and the greenery below. This is taken from the balcony outside the master bedroom, not far the sidewalk in “Time to Leave.” This image doesn’t scare me nearly as much. By Day Five everyone was a veteran.

Gold Pavilion Kyoto 2009-topaz-denoise-sharpen-enhance-7200w.jpg

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Kinkakuji Temple Kyoto.

Kinkakuji Temple, known to many as The Gold Pavilion, has the impact on me the designers intended. It’s an inspiring scene for meditation or contemplation that brings a calm lift on even bad days.

I took this photo on my fourth visit to The Gold Pavilion. My first visit occurred the day after I spoke at the Fourth Management Science Summer Colloquium, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, August 1975. Two US academics were invited to speak each year. Peter Wright then from Stanford was the other invitee. The evening after Peter’s talk and before mine the next day, he and I were the honored guests at a dinner for the 20 or so of us at a revered local Chinese restaurant. Peter was at the head of one large circular table, and I was at the other. Everything was passed to us first. We both ended up eating some combination of delicious food that violently disagreed with our digestive systems. Having adjacent rooms, I heard him occupying the bathroom from about 2:30am on. I felt queasy and sleep deprived, but this was a command appearance. I was reporting joint work with my colleague Masao Nakanishi, the heir apparent to leadership of this distinguished group. As soon as Masao returned to UCLA from a postdoc in Rochester in 1970, he introduced me to attraction models, his generalization of what were called gravity models. His were fully interactive multi-attribute generalizations. If you were trying to predict competitive choices or market shares, these were the best. Some called them “Cadillac models” reflecting the status objects of the time. My report concerned extensions from metrics like dollars, display areas, and travel miles to attribute data like attitudes, perceptions, and opinions. During my presentation a participant asked a question, and I ad-libbed my best guess at a response. I saw Masao look a bit quizzically at me, turn his head to his notebook, and start scribbling equations. His scribbling continued as I went back on topic until finally, he looked up, folded his hands together, and smiled. Apparently, my ad-lib blooper landed in fair territory. I looked green after my presentation and the hosts rushed Peter and I to a clinic in the same hotel. Peter was already drained, but they didn’t get a wastebasket to me before I exploded. Peter and I spent the next few hours on adjacent gurney’s draining IV bags. The next day our host provided us a car and guide for a tour of Kinkakuji Temple and other special sites in Kyoto. As miserable and weak as I felt that day, the Temple and its reflection off the pond brought me comfort. It was 1996 before I had another opportunity to capture this image. I’m still looking for that photo for comparison. The image here comes from a 2009 visit to Japan to thank Akihiro Inoue for his help in the early days of my startup, Strategic Data Corp., which had sold the year before. Akihiro is a former student of both of us – doing his Ph.D. with me at UCLA. He took over the leadership roles when Masao retired and is now approaching retirement himself. Ann and I planned a lot of places we heard good things about. Hiroko, Masao’s wife, said she’d always wanted to visit several of our picks. She is a wonderful artist and a Master of Origami and had worked with Sam Francis when he had his Litho shop in Santa Monica in the early 1970s. We had a grand time visiting a museum built under a mountain top and a whole island devoted to the arts and artists. We visited a museum on a vast estate donated to the country by a distant relative. She showed us the room she slept in when visiting and entertained us with stories of life in this mansion in her youth. These travels formed wonderful memories. I found the same point of view I cherished at my worst in 1975 and one of my best days in 2009. It has the same impact. I am moved by its stillness. I’ve always liked this photo. My decision to retore a 15-year-old JPEG was influenced by Eric Joseph’s photo of the same topic. He hosts a one-on-one session he calls “Inkjet Psychotherapy” to help photographers and printmakers find the paper suited to their tastes. Printing a few of my images on a wide variety of papers and viewing some of his images on different stock, I found Canson Infinity Arches 88 and love the painterly feeling it gives my prints. During that session I saw his Gold-Pavilion photo and had to print mine. It hangs in our apartment in Spain. Printing it here and displaying it after the two fire scenes is my attempt to provide comfort to those in the worst of time and peace to those in the best of times.