Painting Katrina

In seventy-six breathtaking artworks, a New Orleans-based painter explores his city before and after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Phil Sandusky is renowned 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. This collection contains seventy-six color reproductions of Sandusky's paintings. Thirty-one depict New Orleans before Katrina. Thirty depict the immediate aftermath of the storm, focusing primarily on the Lakefront and the Lower Ninth Ward. 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.