Rodrigue formed the basis for his painting style following studies at the Art Center College of Design in L.A. Early Louisiana artists painted the landscape in a European tradition, as though they were looking down from the heavens. But Rodrigue used his contemporary eye, newly trained at art school, to paint the oak tree not only as a symbol of the state, but also as a strong shape. He pushed the tree forefront in his compositions, cutting it off at the top so that the sky created a second shape beneath it. The ground itself was the third shape. These three elements are the basis for hundreds of Rodrigue paintings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

By the mid-1970s, Cajun people became a fourth shape, establishing an evolution which began with a tree, followed by ghostly figures, followed by renderings of Louisiana traditions and legends, and finally to his first painting of the loup-garou , a Cajun myth about a werewolf dog. Using photographs of his studio dog, Tiffany, just as he had used photographs of friends and townspeople for years, Rodrigue painted these early Blue Dogs with red eyes and pale grey-blue fur, set among the above-ground tombs and night sky of Louisiana cemeteries. The evolving image became bluer, and the eyes changed from red to yellow. For the first time Rodrigue stepped out of the Cajun landscape. The loup-garou legend grounded him in Louisiana, while the dog's strong shape and color became the basis for new designs. The paintings became more abstract, and Rodrigue's affinity for design and color became more obvious.

In 2000 Rodrigue broke from representation when he exploded into Hurricanes . His work swirled into a 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 evolves again, reacting to the intense explosion of the Hurricanes with a sudden return to classical nudes, cemeteries, and oak trees. After the colorful fury of the Hurricanes, he embraces the non-color of black-and-white combined with flesh-toned nudes. 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.