Remembering the Caldor Fire in Art

One year after the Caldor Fire changed the landscape surrounding Lake Tahoe (more than 221,000 acres burned and over 1,000 structures destroyed), local artist Shelley Zentner created the amazing art exhibit- Call & Response: Visions of the Forest After Wildfire, housed in the Haldan Gallery at Lake Tahoe Community College.


The fire charred both sides of the valley surrounding Shelley's home. In the aftermath of the fire, Shelley took to long periods of contemplation/creation en plein air, sifting through the ashes in search of meaning, beauty, redemption. The exhibit is made up of drawings and oil paintings created with ash collected from the burn area.

The gallery showed a video with Shelley in nature, creating. I felt a little guilty spying on her but I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the art process.

She even shared her wall of inspiration with everything from her journals, to love notes from her daughter, to tickets stubs from a Depeche Mode concert. How revealing and informative.

Shelley wrote in the gallery guide, "Collecting charcoal from the fire to draw with is a primal, visceral way to engage with the process of a destructive event. I combine charcoal with pastel to create impressionist drawings with a classical structure. Observing morning light spilling over the valley ridge, through burned trees living and dead, I feel the beginnings of a return."





I loved this description by Rishika Kathleen Stebbins, "Shelley Zentner's landscapes quietly insist that the most majestic power on Earth is not born of human effort, but instead resides in what the poet Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." She discovers that force in endless guises in her home territory of the South Lake Tahoe basin - in everything from a pinpoint of sunlight on a leaf to a rainbow of shades in what to a less curious eye is otherwise a nondescript gray rock - and brings it forth in charcoal and oils.

She is a Seer in a very real sense, a painter who both discerns with the eye of a shaman and expertly translates for us Nature's "language" as it governs both the creative and - inevitably -destructive cycles of the forest realm."

This was a unique commemoration of an event that changed so many lives. I'm happy I had a chance to see these works. Beauty from the ugly.  Wow.

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