Phil Sandusky
Phil Sandusky is a nationally renowned plein air impressionist landscape and cityscape painter who has had more than 30 solo exhibits in New Orleans and across the country. Though he is also an accomplished portrait and figure painter, he is best known for his cityscapes of New Orleans. He studied academic art privately from a very early age, and also, having an aptitude in math and science, graduated from Jacksonville University with a BA in Physics in 1980. In keeping with his dual interest in science, Sandusky has tempered his painting with an understanding of vision that goes beyond the age old dictums about optics, light, and perspective to venture into the realms explored by modern vision science.
He has written four books, New Orleans en Plein Air, Painting Katrina, Jacksonville Through a Painter’s Eyes, and New Orleans Impressionist Cityscapes. He has also been the subject of, and often himself written, many articles in such national periodicals as “American Artist”, and “Plein Air Magazine.” He is also one of 276 dead and living artists entered in A Unique Slant of Light, the official bicentennial art history of Louisiana, commissioned by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
Sandusky has been a New Orleans resident since 1984 and has marketed his work there since 1987. In June 2016 he amicably terminated his 22 year affiliation with the Cole Pratt Gallery and has begun to market his work independently in New Orleans and South Louisiana. He is still represented by Stellers Gallery in Jacksonville, FL. His works are in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana State Museum, Historic New Orleans Collection, Beaches Museum, Jacksonville Beach, FL, La Mama International Center for Creative Arts, Umbria, Italy, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, Alexander Brest Museum, Jacksonville, FL, Hastings Foundation, New York, NY, Whitney Bank, New Orleans, LA, and Iberia Bank, New Orleans, LA. In addition to his prolific artistic output, Sandusky teaches landscape, figure, and portrait painting both privately and at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. Sandusky was most recently honored to deliver the keynote address at the 2017 Plein Air South conference. Sandusky’s main objective as a painter is to heighten peoples’ awareness and appreciation of the visual experience. He’s achieved this objective by bettering his understanding of human vision and how it relates to painting. One important way he’s aligned his painting with a higher understanding of vision is to consider vision’s temporal nature.
Many representational artists want to reproduce the objective image that focuses on the retina of the eye. But our vision is constantly changing, even when the overall view is unchanging. Our vision doesn’t reproduce the objective image of an unchanging scene like a camera with a wide angle lens. When we first glance a scene and scan our eyes around it, we notice only incidentally the smaller parts of the view such as people, trees, cars, and other objects. At first, we register these smaller parts more simply and in a unique way that forms our perception of the whole view. As time passes our attention and eye scanning will be drawn in to one smaller part of the view and then another. As we focus our attention on any given part, it becomes a new whole.
Thus our vision of an unchanging view happens over time as we first see the whole view and then see a series of separate parts of the bigger view one after another.
Of great importance is that our perception of any given part – the number of apparent patterns which comprise it and their apparent shapes and colors and even the part’s meaning and emotional effect – is different when we focus all attention on the part than it is when we notice the part incidentally in the context of the bigger view. When representational artists paint by focusing all attention on each part separately, no matter how well they plan, they may reproduce the objective image perfectly, but they can’t help but to compromise their statement of the real human visual experience of the whole subject. The fundamental principle of gestalt is that “the whole is different than the sum of its parts”.
Throughout art history, more often the gestural, quickly executed preliminary studies, are more effective as a whole than the larger more articulated paintings of the same subject. Sandusky found this simple succinct statement to be the most effective way to explore the real, transient nature of vision.
He limits the amount of time he spends on a painting and uses relatively large brushes and small canvases. This encourages him to simplify and think about the parts only in so far as how they relate to the whole.
And he decides how to articulate a part of the subject, not while focusing on it, but instead while moving his eyes around the bigger view, noticing the part incidentally. Another way he aligned his painting more with human vision is to work exclusively from life. The first hand visual experience is completely different and infinitely richer than re-evoking the visual experience second hand using photographic references.
Dealing with the complexity and fleeting nature of the first hand experience also creates adversity which makes him strong.
He’s forced to simplify, develop his memory, better his understanding of the subject as a whole, and become a better painter and draughtsman in general. In his best work he’s captured the fleeting moment, produced paintings which resonate and come to life as the viewer moves back away from the canvas, and he’s provided the viewers of his work with some insight into the nature of their own visual perception.
Choice of subject is of limited importance to him, but he seems to gravitate most often to painting from the landscape and human figure. While he enjoys landscape painting expeditions to such places as Florida beaches and North Carolina mountains, the subject he most often deals with is the ordinary urban environment in which he lives.
Phil Sandusky doesn’t usually seek magnificent subjects to paint because he believes the greatest potential to heighten peoples appreciation of the visual experience lies in showing them the magnificence in the seemingly ordinary things they take for granted.
