Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 65) opposite page: House Broken around Telephone Pole, North Claiborne Avenue and Forstall Street below: Lower 9th Ward Barricaded Street, View down Reynes Street from North Claiborne Avenue carrying clip boards and National Guardsmen. Quite the opposite was true. These people tiptoed around us (when not driving a front loader or HumVee) and treated us with an almost inappropriate respect.” One of his earliest challenges was to learn how to grasp the devastation on canvas. “Artistically, it was challenging to state this debris convincingly. My first attempts made it look more like popcorn or confetti. Eventually, I found that articulating one or two pieces of debris would steer the mind towards perceiving the larger abstracted textured pattern, representing the rest of the debris.” He let the imagery of destruction speak to his sense of imagery and composition. “At first the collapse of a house seemed chaotic and random,” he noted in his journal. “Try to paint it that way and you won’t succeed. It’s amazing how much order and poetry there is in it.” In the Lakeview neighborhood, where the breached 17th Street Canal flooded and destroyed thousands of houses, Sandusky and Larguia witnessed massive bulldozers and other heavy equipment creating mountains of debris from surrounding neighborhoods. “Seeing the scale of this operation firsthand,” he wrote, “gave me more appreciation of the enormity of the damage to my city As I walked around to survey where I was going to paint, again I felt my presence was even more invasive than I had felt in Mid City. I thought that perhaps if I had not spent more time at my Mid City base camp I would not have the stomach for this.” Here in Lakeview he had to work out another issue: “I was torn between my desire to document and my purer painterly motives.” CONFLICTING After a few days painting around the 17th Street Canal, he was ready for the Lower 9th Ward. But again, he had inner conflicts to resolve: “Perhaps much of the guilt that I had felt in the neighborhoods all along was because deep down I have felt like a kid in a candy shop. Artistically, these things we have seen are EMOTIONS Spring 2006/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 65
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