Finding L.A. in the Beauty of Lotuses

Robert Duggan of North Hollywood ordinarily paints nudes, but when the lotus flowers sprouted last month on the lake at Echo Park, he couldn’t resist.

The retired union rep arrives early each morning with an odd haul of tools: an easel, a canvas and an ironing board. At first sighting, you wonder if he’s going to do a lakeside load of laundry to get the creative juices flowing, but the ironing board is a shelf for his palette.

I watched Duggan’s painting take shape as I drove to work each day, the scene before him transferring slowly onto his canvas. I’d see him out there with the others who leave footprints on the dewy lawn, marching to the edge of the lake with their tripods and gear bags. Like an invading army they move, racing to catch the simple drama of a rare flower opening in perfect light.

One day I saw a photographer take a picture of a photographer who was taking a picture of Duggan, who was painting his masterpiece in this garden of impossible color.

That was the day I forgot where I was supposed to be and parked my car.

The lotus flowers are Los Angeles’ own mystery. Nobody knows for sure who planted them roughly 80 years ago, and nobody knows why the Asian symbol of rebirth, purity and life grows here like nowhere else in the United States.

“We keep trying to find something definitive,” says Joanne Venditto, a Recreation and Parks Department official and chair of the Lotus Festival to be held Saturday and Sunday in Echo Park. “We’re looking for anyone who has any information about the history.”

Just as the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano in March, the lotus flowers appear in early June, jungling up to heights of 6 or 8 feet by July.

Pink flowers roost like exotic birds atop floppy green leaves the size of elephant ears, and unrepentant beauty threatens to jump these shores and devour the asphalt city.

Letitia Melara and Gloria Moran are walking laps around the lake when I arrive, picking up trash as if this were their own garden. Chilo Carrillo, a man I don’t know, comes up to me and volunteers some personal information as if he has no choice.

“I’d be picking up trash, too, but apparently I have cancer,” he says. There is nothing I can do but acknowledge the gravity of the news, and eventually the subject returns to the flowers that have drawn a dozen photographers on this morning. A dozen photographers and one painter.

Duggan, a hobbyist who took up painting four years ago, looks over the tops of the lotus flowers and across the lake, squinting into the early morning light as he mixes paint.

“This is the best time of day,” he says. “That’s why you see all these people here. If you come between 7:30 and noon, the palms across the lake are backlit. Do you see it? There’s this silvery, beautiful light, and then it’s gone.”

The ironing board, it seems, is not the only thing that sets Duggan apart from other painters and photographers.

“They tend to go down to the end of the lake and look back toward the downtown skyline,” he says. “That way they get this play of nature against the vertical upshoot of the city.”

But Duggan, who hitchhiked to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh in 1962 and never went home after seeing the palms sway across a canopy of blue sky, isn’t interested in a postcard of the modern metropolis.

Looking east instead of south, into this muted, ascendant light, he sees old L.A.

“That’s what I find exciting,” he says, stealing the past and reassembling it on his canvas with brush and spatula. In his painting, two-thirds done after three weeks, the lotus bed is the floor from which the history of the city rises.

It was here that scenes from the Keystone Kops movies were filmed. It was here that Fatty Arbuckle’s boat sank into the lake. It was here that someone, maybe Chinese missionaries, planted the symbol of rebirth to one day soothe Chilo Carrillo as he walks around the lake heavy with worry.

Dusty sunlight moves through the trees on the hill across the way, briefly illuminating whitewashed Spanish villas with red tile roofs. Duggan takes his spatula and draws it across a patch of canvas, wishing on a conspiracy of luck and inspiration.

“He’s pretty good,” says a teenager who takes a picture of Duggan and his painting.

The lotus flowers, content in the mystery of their own being, seem to have grown another 6 inches in the short time I’ve been here.

“They’re amazing,” says Robert Duggan, whose brush discovers the ageless city in the morning light.