Forces that Inspire: New Orleans through a plein air painter’s eyes
Anyone who loves or gets misty-eyed over the thought of New Orleans will be drawn to the Impressionistic plein air paintings of Phil Sandusky that are on view this month at Cole Pratt Gallery on Magazine Street, with an opening reception November 7.
From the shady streets of the South Carrollton area to the Garden District and Bywater neighborhoods, the plethora of Creole cottages, Victorian homes, ordinary shotgun houses, and humble corner stores that define the city are eloquently captured on Sandusky’s canvases in his new body of work.
Like a modern-day Monet, he can often be seen walking around the streets of Uptown New Orleans (often in my neighborhood with his small dog), with his easel in hand. Sandusky is easily identifiable by his characteristic sun visor and shaggy blonde hair and by his obvious vigor and enjoyment of painting in the fresh air.
“I like the architecture of New Orleans,” Sandusky says. “It is not all pristine. The buildings age quickly and they are more organic than other places, so there is a lot of character to the architecture with the old wood framed buildings. From Victorian to Spanish stucco, there is such variety,” he reflects. “It’s like a little tropical paradise here. There is also a lush variety of foliage that you don’t have anywhere else,” he concludes. “Right now, there is a bunch of papaya trees growing around town.”
Painting doesn’t get any fresher than this. The artist works quickly, on average just three hours per canvas, but he says, “I only keep about one canvas per week out of the five canvases I have done. There is a crispness, immediacy to it. I work exclusively from life.”
Sandusky not only limits the time spent on a painting, but he also uses relatively large brushes and small canvases. “These limitations encourage simplification and thinking about the parts only in so far as they relate to the whole,” he explains. “I believe that when representational artists paint by focusing all attention on each part separately, no matter how well they plan, they may reproduce the image perfectly, but they can’t help but compromise their statement of the real human visual experience of the whole subject,” he continues. “The fundamental principle of gestalt is that ‘the whole is different than the sum of its parts.’ I have found this quickly executed, simple statement to be the most effective way for me to explore the real, transient nature of the visual experience.”
There is always just enough description in Sandusky’s seemingly vague strokes of color to remind our eyes to recall recognizable forms while producing an emotional response. A stroke of blue becomes a dilapidated roof; smears of purple define dreamy flowers on a towering tree; dabs of green suggest palm fronds swaying in the wind; a scratch of brown depicts a compromised telephone line. “In my best work I have captured the fleeting moment, produced paintings that resonate and come to life as the viewer moves back away from the canvas, and have provided the viewer with some insight into the nature of their own visual perception,” he says.
There is something inviting about his belle époque style with hints of Gustave Caillebotte and flourishes of William Merritt Chase. The subjects that Sandusky seeks out most often deal with the ordinary urban environment. “I don’t usually seek magnificent subjects to paint because I believe the greatest potential to heighten people’s appreciation of the visual experience lies in showing them the magnificence in the seemingly mundane, ordinary things they take for granted,” he points out. “My main objective as a painter has been to understand the mechanics of human vision and how it relates to painting.”
Formerly an engineer, Sandusky’s degree is in physics. “When I was an engineer, I spent every night drawing or painting, and I spent a lot of time honing my skill.” Sandusky gave up engineering in 1991 to become a full-time artist. As a painter, his intense attention to light and composition betrays his meticulous, scientific sensibilities. He focuses intently on the scale of his compositions and the depiction of light through different values of color. Just as the Impressionists had an acute understanding of the science of optics, Sandusky understands the psychophysical sense of sight.
“Impressionism is really the style of painting that I do,” he says. “It’s the pinnacle of representational painting because it gets past the physical subject. It really embraces the mechanics of human vision,” he points out. “With Impressionism, you look at things at a glance. When you see a part, there is a way that the part is in relation to the whole. Impressionist painters try to capture that first thing you see when you first lay eyes on something, not the individual little parts.”
The author of three books, including New Orleans en Plein Air, which was published prior to hurricane Katrina, Sandusky created a collection of Katrina devastation paintings that were showcased in his second book, Painting Katrina, which shows the paintings he did before and after the hurricane. It includes journals of his experiences. His third book, Jacksonville Through a Painter’s Eyes was released in 2008. “It is perhaps my best text,” he says. “I’m going to do another book, New Orleans en Plein Air Deux, when I get to around 150 paintings. To me, a book of paintings is like a book of poetry. Being an artist, I want to publish art books as much as possible so that the paintings are accessible to as many people as possible. You don’t have to buy them.”
An instructor of landscape and life painting at New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts since 1994, Sandusky has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout America, and his works are in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Louisiana State Museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Whitney Bank in New Orleans, the Hastings Foundation in New York, the Danforth Museum of Art in Massachusetts, the Alexander Brest Museum in Florida, and the La Mama International Center for Creative Arts in Umbria, Italy. Locally, he is represented by Cole Pratt Gallery. ✦
