2009 National Conference Program - PCA/ACA

SPECIAL SESSIONS
Alphabetical by
Title/Area
instead he would return home with his new knowledge and give meaning to a new phrase:
Cajun Artist.
Using the oak tree as his main subject in hundreds of paintings in the early 1970s, Rodrigue
eventually expanded 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. They floated almost like ghosts and appeared locked in the landscape, often framed by
the trunk of a tree or the outline of a bush. The roads and rivers became one dark path
leading to the small light underneath the oaks.
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 werewolftype
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, and soon
realized 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 just as he always had with the oak trees and Cajuns, 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. Whereas with the Cajuns Rodrigue
commented on the past, the Blue Dog allowed him to comment on today.
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 2005, Rodrigue premiered Bodies, reacting to the intense explosion of the Hurricanes with
a sudden return to classical nudes, cemeteries, and oak trees. Using the computer, he remasters
the original painting 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.
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 hosted a 40-year Rodrigue
retrospective in July 2007, which then traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art in the
spring of 2008, where the museum received 60,000 visitors, an attendance record for a
contemporary show or living artist. In 2009 the University of Louisiana’s College of the Arts
in Lafayette honors Rodrigue during the spring semester with exhibitions at the University
Art Museum and the Acadiana Center for the Arts, as well as bestowing upon him an
honorary doctorate.
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