About this painting the artist says “It depicts survivors struggling in the floodwaters of the 2005 historic storm which devastated New Orleans, my hometown. Part of my inspiration came from Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, which I was fortunate to see in the Louvre… I dealt with similar themes in Katrina – man struggling against nature, in a disaster complicated by government scandals and incompetence. I spent almost a year creating my painting, doing many thumbnail sketches, working with models, interviewing survivors, and painting the final piece which is on a cradled wood panel. One of my models was a survivor who lost everything in the storm. One of the girls holds a cat that symbolizes all the animals traumatized by the storm, thousands of which didn’t survive. The human figures represent the resilience and strength of the human spirit, along with their states of disbelief, fear, determination and uncertainty.”
