Rodrigue Studio

A GuestLife Monterey Bay
Great Gallery

During the mid-1960s Rodrigue attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, which provided him a solid foundation in drawing and painting. Outside of art school, L.A. was full of Pop and Abstract influences, leading to his life-long interest in repetitive imagery, color, and design.

Upon his return to Louisiana, Rodrigue used the oak tree as his main subject in hundreds of paintings in the early 1970s, eventually expanding his subjects to include the Cajun people and traditions, as well as his interpretations of myths such as Jolie Blonde and Evangeline. He painted the Cajuns in white with little or no shadow, a light shining from within these transplanted people, giving them hope.

THE BLUE DOG

It was one of these myths, the loup-garou, which inspired Rodrigue’s most famous series, the Blue Dog. Painted for a book of Cajun ghost stories (Bayou, Inkwell, 1984), this werewolf-type dog was an already familiar legend for Rodrigue, who heard the story often as a boy. With no image for the loup-garou, the artist searched his files for a suitable shape. He found it in photos of his studio dog Tiffany who had died several years before. Rodrigue used her stance and manipulated her shape to meet his needs for the painting. Under a blue night sky he painted the image a pale grey-blue and gave it red eyes. He liked what he saw and added this image to his pictorial list of favorite Cajun legends, painting it in cemetery and bayou scenes intermittently over the next five or six years.

Over time, Rodrigue changed the dog’s eyes to yellow, creating a friendlier image, soon realizing that the Blue Dog could take him anywhere on the canvas — even out of Cajun country. He explored his earlier Pop and Abstract interests in a more obvious way, breaking his canvas into strong shapes, with the addition of bold blocks of color and a new signature-type shape in the mix. Gradually the dog became bluer and the paintings more abstract, yet the canvases remained rooted in Rodrigue’s Louisiana heritage and traditional training.

In 2000, Rodrigue broke from representation when he exploded into the eerily prophetic works Hurricanes. His art swirled into an abstract series of Louisiana storms, a hint of an oak tree or a pair of yellow eyes occasionally caught amidst the mass of color and brushstroke.

In his latest series, Bodies, Rodrigue reacts to the intense explosion of the Hurricanes with a sudden return to classical nudes, cemeteries and oak trees. Using the computer, he re-masters the original painting (strictly flesh-toned, with black and white backgrounds) with color and repetitive imagery, using archival inkjet technology and in some cases mounting the finished five-foot prints on steel. As with each series over the past forty years, Rodrigue developed a new mode of expression in a contemporary way, using Louisiana and its timeless symbols as a basis.

In 1989 Rodrigue opened his own gallery on Royal Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, and in 1991 he followed with a gallery in Carmel, California. After Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, he relocated his French Quarter gallery temporarily to Lafayette, Louisiana — ironically just down the street from his very first gallery, opened in 1970.

“We Will Rise Again shows the American flag covered with water. The blue dog is partly submerged and its eyes, normally yellow, are red with a broken heart. Like a ship’s S.O.S., the red cross on the dog’s chest calls out for help.” — G.R.
Sales of the print benefit the Southeast Louisiana Chapter of the American Red Cross.

Museums continue to acknowledge Rodrigue’s accomplishments, particularly following the release of the monograph The Art of George Rodrigue (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2003). The Dixon Gallery and Gardens Museum in Memphis, Tennessee opens a 40-year Rodrigue retrospective in 2007, which then tours to several U.S. venues, including the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Rodrigue Studio -
Carmel, CA: Corner of Sixth Avenue and Dolores
(831) 626-4444

More Information - Websites, Maps and Directions

New Orleans - 721 Royal Street
(504) 581-4244 (check Web for current status)*

Lafayette, LA - 2021 Pinhook Road
(337) 233-3274