Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 64) CONFRONTING Like most New Orleans area residents, Sandusky evacuated the Saturday before the storm. With his wife, mother-in-law, two dogs and three cats, the family sought refuge in Jacksonville, Florida. His wife, Michelle Many, a clinical social worker for the LSU Department of Psychiatry, returned to the city a week after the storm to coordinate a mental health program for the city’s first responders. After a couple of weeks in Jacksonville, Sandusky traveled to Atlanta where he did several paintings of the Atlanta cityscape and participated in a hurricane relief exhibit. He returned to New Orleans briefly to place a tarp over his damaged roof and then drove back to Jacksonville. While there, he felt a growing urgency to return to New Orleans to paint Katrina’s destruction before cleaning crews removed the debris. With painting buddy Diego Larguia, Sandusky spent the next three months working his way into neighborhoods that had suffered the worst damage. First they traveled to Mid City neighborhoods, then to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain around the destroyed Southern Yacht Club, Lakeview and 17th Street Canal, and finally the Lower Ninth Ward. “Each time we set up to paint I always had a sick feeling that we were going to be run off at any moment,” he wrote in his journal. “There were so many officials and workers wearing hard hats and THE DEVASTATION 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. 64 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006
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