Born and raised in the heart of French Louisiana, George Rodrigue (b. 1944)
has achieved international success with his Blue Dog paintings and prints.
His interest in art began when he was a young child, and continued through
college at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and onto Los Angeles
where he was accepted into the prestigious Art Center College of Design at
the young age of nineteen. Longing for his homeland, he returned to Lafayette
in 1968 and accepted the position of art director at an advertising agency.
One of his first jobs was to produce signs for a local racetrack. Unfamiliar
with the technique, Rodrigue contacted Edmond de Boisblanc, owner of Crown
Screen Processors, who introduced him to the process of screenprinting, thus
beginning his lifelong interest in printmaking. His origins in sign making
led him to adopt the term silkscreen (or screenprint) to describe his work,
rather than the widely-accepted art term, serigraph.
After only one year in the advertising business, Rodrigue left to paint full-time.
His early paintings focused on his Cajun ancestry and the disappearing Louisiana
landscape, as did his first silkscreens. While Rodrigue painted in this style
for nearly twenty years, only two silkscreens were produced from this period.
By 1980 his reputation was well established, and he received countless requests
from Acadiana to produce works for festivals and fundraising efforts. He created
dozens of inexpensive offset lithographs for the various events, making him
one of the best-known artists in Louisiana. He has said that it is this experience
that motivated him to make a clean break from the way he produced and sold
his Blue Dog silkscreens. His desire was to produce original prints as specific
works of art in small, limited runs, as opposed to mass-produced reproductions
of his paintings.
In the early days, Rodrigue had to first draw his designs or sketches on plates,
paper or Mylar. These drawings then become stencils used in the printing process
– a different stencil for each color. Rodrigue soon realized that by
adding stencils to, or dropping others from an edition, he could create relatively
small editions that were quite special – as demonstrated in the set
of six Codex Blue Dog silkscreens. Rodrigue continued to experiment with split-fonts
(or variegated colors), in which he poured different colors on the screens
at the same time – a process that resulted in a one of a kind print.
As advances were made in technology, the artist changed the way in which he
produced his works. While early works were done entirely by hand, carefully
applying the paint in a trial and error format, later works could be designed
on the computer, manipulated on the computer and printed with the use of computer-generated
silkscreen film. As you look around the gallery, it becomes evident that the
color of early works is thicker, and the designs are simpler. Later works
are brighter in color, designs are more complex and the size of the print
is much larger. When Rodrigue first began to make prints, the image of the
Blue Dog was basically a two-color entity. As the computer became an extension
of his color palette, suddenly a seemingly limitless number of color variations
were now available to him.
Rodrigue continues to explore and experiment with the computer, and most recently
has added photography as a tool to create his prints. Photography has always
been a part of his creative process, and it is now a part of his printmaking.
In combination with the computer, he is now manipulating and fusing images
to create almost collage-type constructions.