The Los Angeles painter Alec Egan had spent two years preparing work for a solo exhibition that was scheduled to open in late January at Anat Ebgi gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. Now every one of those canvases is gone.

“It’s terror and despair,” said Egan in a telephone interview from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he, his wife and two young children had evacuated — the only hotel he said was open.

Egan is among several Los Angeles artists who lost their studios, their artworks — and in some cases their homes — in this week’s fires. Now many are picking up the pieces of their lives and worrying about whether they’ll be able to make a living anytime soon.

Diana Thater, an artist celebrated for her nature-inspired film and light installations, and her husband, the conceptual artist T. Kelly Mason, stored their archive — including decades’ worth of raw video footage, master tapes, hard drives and paintings — in a temperature-controlled garage that burned to the ground along with their home in Altadena.

“It’s hard to live to be 62 years old and lose your entire life in one night,” Thater said from a friend’s house in nearby Atwater Village, where she and Mason are sleeping on the floor with their three cats.