George Rodrigue, featured artist
Born and raised in New Iberia, Louisiana, artist George Rodrigue (b. 1944) is best known for his Blue Dog paintings, which catapulted him to worldwide fame in the early 1990s. His art studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette followed by graduate work at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California gave him a foundation that spawned one of the greatest success stories in southern art. Rodrigue, who began painting in the third grade while bedridden with polio, had already won local acclaim for his rich portrayals of the landscape and people of South Louisiana when Blue Dog transformed the image of the original Cajun werewolf dog, the loup-garou,into an international pop icon.
Today Rodrigue describes himself as an abstract artist who happens to paint things we recognize. From his earliest commitment to graphically interpret the landscape and culture of South Louisiana, oftentimes the actual subjects within his paintings are secondary to the focus on shape, design, and color.
From March 1 to June 8, 2008 the New Orleans Museum of Art hosted George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Forty Years of Cajuns, Blue Dogs and Beyond Katrina, an exhibition featuring more than two hundred original works. The show was the most successful ever in the museum’s 98-year history for a living artist or contemporary show.
Rodrigue continues to sell his art without wholesaling or mass-production, selling only at his own galleries in New Orleans, Aspen and Carmel, CA. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Wendy. His son Andre Rodrigue is a student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His son Jacques Rodrigue, a recent graduate of Tulane Law School, works alongside his father with gallery operations.
