The dark cloud covering much of Boyle Heights was so wide it felt as if it could swallow up the houses and church at St. Louis and 2nd streets.
The view left me stunned as I drove to the Boyle Heights Beat newsroom to get masks before heading to the scene of the Lineage warehouse fire that had been burning for over an hour.
I briefly stopped my car on the roundabout, grabbed my iPhone and snapped a photo. I couldn’t help but feel spooked. It was then that I realized this fire was going to be different.
My photo has appeared in our stories about air quality, health concerns, and a monthslong cleanup.
Now, it has taken on a new life.
Los Angeles artist Diego Cardoso transformed the image into a piece of art, turning a moment of breaking news into a lasting memory of a defining event in Boyle Heights.
In late June, I responded to a comment Cardoso left on one of our Instagram posts featuring my photo. He asked who had taken it and if he could access an unedited copy of the photo so he could turn it into a painting.
I was familiar with Cardoso’s art. His paintings are vibrant and colorful. They often feature LA’s freeways, palm trees, buses, alleys and other cityscapes and landmarks. Light plays a major role in his work, he said. You see sharp shadows and rosy sunsets. I particularly remember his painting of the Boyle Heights Bridge runners gathering at Mariachi Plaza for their usual Wednesday night run. It highlights a lit-up Sixth Street Bridge, the downtown LA skyline with different hues of blue transitioning into nighttime.
I sent him the photo.
Cardoso, a former transportation planner with LA Metro, also visited the intersection to observe and snap his own photos. He showed me his progress mid-August and by the end of the month, he posted his finished piece on Instagram, appropriately accompanied with the song “Goodbye Blue Sky” by Pink Floyd. In his caption, Cardoso highlighted the industrial shift in communities like Boyle Heights.
Last week, I visited his downtown LA studio to see the finished acrylic painting in person. Measuring 36 by 48 inches, it was striking to see the dark plume of smoke against the colorful Boyle Heights homes. Cardoso said he intentionally painted it at that scale to show the magnitude of the fire. To Cardoso, it was important to see “what’s in front of us, but also what’s ahead and beyond us.”
Cardoso sees his artwork as a way of documenting and preserving history.
One of his paintings during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 shows a mostly empty freeway with a lone truck on the highway loaded with yardwork equipment. “The gardeners are still working,” he said.
Another piece of art that summer in 2020 marks the demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd, capturing a message emblazoned along Abbot Kinney Boulevard reading, “Please, man, I didn’t do nothing serious.”
“I’m kind of like an artist who is a journalist looking at the city,” Cardoso told me from his downtown LA studio.
Cardoso said he draws inspiration from magical realism and from writers Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, who embody the style in the way they describe the communities, places and stories they write about. He likened them to journalists.
He said he brings magical realism “not on words, but on the art, on paint.”
