I stayed in touch with the Churgins after they retired to California. Wally died in 2005, but I heard from Shirley now and again, and Roberta and I visited her when we were in California a few years back. The paintings were as lovely as I had remembered.
Unfortunately, the Churgin home was in Pacific Palisades. When I saw the news this month of the devastating wildfire there, I tried to contact Shirley by phone, text, and email without success. I was finally able to reach her daughter, who told me that Shirley had managed to evacuate but that the house and all its contents were gone.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in your 90s and to lose all the things you have assembled over a lifetime. Many of them have sentimental value only to you and your family – photographs, tchotchkes acquired on vacation, potholders made by great-grandchildren, and the like. The destruction of works of art, however, is a financial loss as well as a sentimental one. (I am currently working with the family on a loss appraisal for their insurance company.)
In a larger sense, though, the loss of those artworks is something greater, something that extends to us all. Now there are five fewer Dufner paintings in the world. A small bit of the beauty around us has been lost.
Musing about all the terrible losses from the Southern California fires, I thought of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Lapis Lazuli,” in which the poet speaks of the transitory nature of works of art. We know of the ancient Greek sculptor Callimachus only through accounts of his work by his astonished contemporaries, Yeats says; no handiwork of his remains.
But the world goes on. And the artistic impulse to give visual delight goes on. As Yeats says in his poem:
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
