Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 62) A Brush with Disaster by John R. Kemp 62 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006 lein-air painting is like a morning sunrise, a bird’s song, a fragrant summer breeze or a memory. They’re fleeting moments, never to be the same again. They can capture and then release the imagination to create a sonnet, a song or a painting. New Orleans artist Phil Sandusky is one of those few artists who explore the city’s landscape with only his paints, brushes and easel to let the moment speak to his imagination. Sandusky searches not for the grand or eloquent but for the ordinary — a shotgun house, cars parked on narrow streets, a sidewalk busy with shoppers. He finds beauty in what he calls the “mundane.” That is until New Orleans met Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding destroyed entire neighborhoods. In the months following the storm, he could be P found daily roaming the most devastated sections of the city, especially in the now fabled Lower Ninth Ward. There his palette turned from the mundane to the tragic — homes and lives destroyed, broken and twisted ruins of shotgun houses resting upon crushed vehicles, a hulking steel river barge marooned in a sea of debris that was once a living, thriving community. His painterly plein-air paintings are silent moments and immediate images of despair, of what has been lost,
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