Painting Katrina

Phil Sandusky is a nationally renowned plein air artist known for his cityscapes, particularly those of New Orleans. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Sandusky returned home, postponing repairs to his own damaged house in order to begin recording the devastation in his beloved city. The result is a collection of work that offers a vision of the beauty and fragility of New Orleans and displays the awesome power of nature. The book contains color reproductions of seventy-six of Sandusky's paintings: thirty created a year before Katrina, depicting New Orleans in better times; thirty in the immediate aftermath of the storm, focusing primarily on scenes of devastation at the lakefront and the Lower Ninth Ward; and the last sixteen painted approximately one year after Katrina, showing both the city's painstaking recovery and nature's reclamation of parts of New Orleans. Sandusky prefaces the paintings with background about his style and a compelling journal chronicling his experience exploring and capturing the hurricane devastation.