Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 66) 66 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006 so beautiful. When one sees a 19th century naturalist painting of a shipwreck tossed up onto an iceberg, there is death and destruction, but there is also a higher beauty in the power of nature and the human drama.” By the time he reached the Lower Ninth Ward — that “hallowed ground” — a little more than two months after the storm, he had resolved those conflicts “between my artistic motives and my need to demonstrate my sadness for all the pain and misery Katrina had inflicted on my beloved city.” He knew he could “feel artistically elated on the inside, as long as it was coupled with quiet respect.” There he found complicated emotions among the people. “When I went down there I felt like I was looking at tombs and broken lives,” he says. “I had conflicts of feelings. I felt like I was in church but artistically I was elated with this force of nature.” Writing in his journal, he thought he would see people there “wailing and crying up into the heavens over their incomprehensible losses.” Sandusky did find some of that, especially among older people who knew that a way of life had been destroyed. He describes an elderly woman who cried when she saw him painting the house where a close friend had died. He found younger Lower 9th Ward Neighborhood Seen From the North Claiborne Bridge “If New Orleans is to survive and thrive in the third millennium it is important that we appreciate how beautiful and fragile it is.” – Phil Sandusky Houses Along Reynes Street between North Derbigny and North Roman Streets
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