Painting Katrina Hardcover - 2007

From the jacket flap

"His painterly plein-air paintings are silent moments and immediate images of despair, of what has been lost, and uncertainty. In a sense, they are historical moments burned into the city's history."
--John Kemp, Louisiana Cultural Vistas

"Plein air painting doesn't get any surer or fresher than this."
--Doug MacCash, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Phil Sandusky is a nationally renowned artist known for his plein-air cityscapes, particularly those done in his hometown of New Orleans. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, Sandusky returned to New Orleans, postponing repairs to his own badly damaged house to begin recording the devastation in his beloved city. The result is a series of remarkable paintings of hurricane destruction executed on location.

Painting Katrina is an unprecedented artistic response to one of the worst natural disasters to impact the United States. A January 2006 exhibition of some of these paintings was so well received that several pieces were acquired by such prominent collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Louisiana State Museum. American Artist magazine also featured Sandusky's paintings in an article on the post-Katrina recovery of the New Orleans art scene.

This collection contains seventy-six color reproductions of Sandusky's paintings: thirty-one were done before Katrina, depicting New Orleans in better times; thirty were done in the immediate aftermath of the storm, focusing primarily on scenes of devastation at the Lakefront and in the Lower Ninth Ward; and the last fifteen were executed approximately one year after Katrina and show the city's painstaking recovery. Sandusky prefaces these paintings with background information about his style of painting and a compelling journal chronicling his experience exploring and painting the hurricane devastation.

Phil Sandusky's first book with Pelican was New Orleans en Plein Air. He is currently represented by the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, the Reinike Gallery in Atlanta, and Stellers Gallery in Jacksonville. He has published several articles in American Artist, and he serves as instructor of landscape and life painting at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts.

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 10/15/2007, Page 18
• Reference and Research Bk News, 02/01/2008, Page 220