After a wildfire destroyed her art, she started over with a blank canvas

At 85, a renowned portraitist finds new inspiration in love and in abstract painting.

- BY TIM CHESTER

ALICE MATZKIN was widely acclaimed for her portraits, even landing a spot on an "Oprah" segment.

(COLIN MCCARTHY For The Times)

When the Thomas fire tore through Ventura County in late 2017, it incinerated most of Alice Matzkin's life’s work. Around 100 of her paintings that were stored in a shed outside her home were lost, including several family pictures and a series of portraits of older people that formed a body of work and a book, “The Art of Aging.”

It was a devastating loss, but the Ojai artist took it in stride. “It was shocking, but there was nothing I could do,” she tells me from her art-filled home. “I could either go bang my head against the wall and scream and cry and go nuts, or just say: ‘It happened. Thank God the house didn’t burn down.’”

“My other thought was, ‘Well, when we're dead, the kids won't have to worry about what to do with all these paintings.’”

Her sanguine — and mischievously macabre — response belies the fact that the fire, coupled with the long years of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused an extended fallow period during which she completely stopped creating art.

It was a striking pause after a long, successful career as a portrait artist. Her painting of Chelsea Clinton hung in the White House during Bill Clinton's tenure, and her depictions of Betty Friedan, who wrote “The Feminine Mystique,” and potter Beatrice Wood have been featured in the National Portrait Gallery. (Her work on aging was even the subject of an “Oprah” segment in 2001.)

Then one day, some two years ago, she heard a voice in her head while sweeping the floor, telling her: “Go to the studio and don’t worry about what you're going to do. Just go do something.”