2005 / 2004 / 2003 / 2002 / 2001 / 2000 / 1999 / 1998 / 1997 / 1996 / 1995 / 1994 /1993 / 1992 / 1991 / 1990 / 1980s / 1970s / 1960s

The Independent Florida Sun

‘Blue Dog’ artist still bringing Cajun Louisiana to life in his work
3/26/2004
The Pensacola Museum of Art is celebrating its 50th Anniversary Louisiana-style.

The celebration includes Cajuns, Blue Dogs and Hurricanes—the art of the renowned George Rodrigue. The exhibit is a 40-year retrospective of over 50 Rodrigue works. Art lovers will be able to sense Louisiana’s grand oak trees draped with Spanish moss and the spicy smell of Cajun cooking in Rodrigue’s work.

Pensacola art lovers will get a chance to meet Rodrigue, whose exhibit opens at the PMA on April 2 and continues through May 15. On Friday, April 2 the PMA opens with a Blue Dog Weekend, holding an opening reception from 5-7 p.m. with Rodrigue and his wife, Wendy. Then, Rodrigue is scheduled to be at the PMA Saturday Workshop for Kids from 1-2 p.m. Saturday, April 3 to help the young budding artists paint pictures of their own pets. Following the workshop from 2:30-5 p.m. Rodrigue plans to sign books at the PMA of his latest publication, “The Art of George Rodrigue.”

Rodrigue says he’s excited about the new book.

“It is the first (book) that really explains from 1968 to the present, and it just shows the whole continuation,” he says in a recent interview with the Shreveport Times. “That’s what other books hadn’t done, you know, how did you jump from the Cajun to the blue dog.”

During the past 40 years, Rodrigue has completed three major bodies of works:
Cajuns, Blue Dogs and Hurricanes. This retrospective exhibit includes paintings from
each of these groups including Rodrigue’s world famous Blue Dog paintings such as Watchdog, the first ever Blue Dog painting, and Loup Garou among others.

The PMA exhibition also includes works from the 1960s and 1970s, including his popular Aioli Dinner and Straub’s Coulee. The retrospective continues to present day with his latest works of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the Louisiana State University Mascot Mike the Tiger.

Rodrigue was born in 1944 in New Iberia, La., and began painting when he was 9 and bedridden from a bout with polio. He continued to study art through college, traveling to Los Angeles to attend school.

Then in the late ‘60s, Rodrigue came back to his home in southwestern Louisiana to paint what was becoming a extinct way of life—his Cajun way of life.

“(Rodrigue’s) interest was documentary,” says Michael Lewis in the preface to Rodrigue’s latest publication, “The Art of George Rodrigue.”

“Dismissing the sentimentality that artists used when attempting to portray the world of Cajun Louisiana, Rodrigue instead chose “a painterly moil as opaque and untelling as the local swamp waters, using heavy oil, very thick, applied with a brush, very bold,” says Ginger Danto in the introduction to the book. “It was these works known simply as his ‘Cajuns’ that first brought Rodrigue critical acclaim.”

Rodrigue continued to draw critical acclaim throughout the ‘70s with his pictures of Cajuns that by then had transformed from Louisiana landscape scenes to pictures of Cajuns in Louisiana.

It was not until 1984 in a book with 40 ghost stories, “Bayou” that Rodrigue’s Blue Dog first appeared. The figure transpired out of Rodrigue’s need to find a suitable character to portray the loup garou or werewolf for the story’s plot. After much thought, Rodrigue struck upon the idea of using his late dog, “Tiffany,” as a model for the creature who, in the books, would haunt the sugarcane fields. The “narrative moonlight” in the painting gave the dog its now famous blue color and thus the legend of the Blue Dog was born.

In 2002 in the aftermath of Hurricane Lili, Rodrigue began his Hurricane series. Rodrigue witnessed the destruction and turmoil that Lili left behind on the coast of Louisiana, which led him to see that the swirls of color seen throughout his life’s work.

Danto praises the swirl of color in Rodrigue’s hurricane paintings. She writes: “How fitting once again the dog’s expression, its prescient fright, its shock of seeing, against the perpetual yellow storm, the limbo of spun cloud, of almost nuclear glow, a force beyond reckoning. As if somewhere Blue Dog saw it coming all along.”

Story courtesy of the Pensacola Museum of Art