Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 70) 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.” DEFINING “PERCEPTIONIST” In a way, Sandusky’s images of city streets and neighborhoods are like seeing them through the rain-dappled windshield of an automobile as one drives around the city. They leave impressions of the familiar, but through his eyes. Though he hesitatingly describes himself as an Impressionist painter, in the truest 19th-century sense of the term, he says a more accurate designation would be “perceptionist.” The term Impressionism, he says, was coined by a 19th-century writer who didn’t care for the work. If artists had named the movement, he claims they would have called it “Perceptionism,” for it appreciates the fleeting moment. “It’s the pinnacle of the art form that best reconciles how we see with art. It’s the ultimate of human visual perception.” In a January 2006 review of Sandusky’s show of Katrina paintings at Cole Pratt Gallery, New Orleans art critic Doug MacCash said Sandusky “achieves perfect clarity without the preciousness that sometimes plagues Impressionists.” MacCash went on to write that Sandusky’s “paintings are astoundingly economical. Seemingly vague strokes of ivory and pink magically become a neo-classical townhouse, a smear of blue and a few scratch marks become a clapboard cottage, dabs of purple define a blooming azalea. There’s always just enough visual description, never too much.” And that is why Sandusky paints plein-air, outside on location, a method used by the Impressionists. “Each day is Among Phil Sandusky’s many pre-Katrina paintings of New Orleans are the following: top: Houses near Audubon Park above: Huey Long Bridge opposite page: St. Peter and Paul Church 70 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.