Picture of George Rodrigue Selling Art on Sidewalk Blue Dog Man Sells on Street
George Rodrigue, Painter of Bluish Dog, Dies at 69
George Rodrigue'due south career as an artist started with nighttime and lush landscapes of his native Louisiana bayou. But information technology shifted abruptly, and profitably, when he began a series of portraits of a unmarried subject: a melancholy mutt that came to be known as Blue Dog.
Mr. Rodrigue, who died on Dec. fourteen in Houston at 69, ready out to certificate and celebrate Cajun culture with works like "The Aioli Dinner" (1971), which depicts traditional gatherings on the lawns of plantations.
He won recognition in France and Italy. He painted portraits of famous people, including the glory chef Paul Prudhomme — who helped popularize Cajun nutrient and culture in the 1970s — likewise as Walker Percy, Huey Long, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Among his many commissions was a request in 1984 that he do the artwork for a drove of Cajun ghost stories, including a painting of a ghost dog, or werewolf, known in his part of the earth as the loup-garou.
Mr. Rodrigue (pronounced rod-REEG) found his model in his studio: a photo of his dog, Tiffany, who had died. She was blackness and white in reality but became blue in his imagination, with yellowish eyes. She was too a she, but she could get a he — or, for that affair, any else a viewer was prepared to meet.
"The yellow eyes are really the soul of the domestic dog," Mr. Rodrigue told The New York Times in 1998. "He has this piercing stare. People say the dog keeps talking to them with the optics, e'er saying something different."
He added: "People who have seen a Blue Dog painting always recall information technology. They are really about life, most mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And you're looking at him, looking for some answers, 'Why are nosotros hither?,' and he's only looking dorsum at you, wondering the same. The dog doesn't know. You tin see this longing in his eyes, this longing for love, answers."
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By the early 1990s, Mr. Rodrigue was painting only Blue Canis familiaris.
"I dropped all the Cajun influence," he said in an interview with the New Orleans public television station WLAE.
Mr. Rodrigue was born in New Iberia in southern Louisiana on March xiii, 1944, the simply child of George and Marie Rodrigue. His father was a bricklayer. He began learning to draw and pigment after he was found to have polio at age 8 and spent several months in bed. He studied art at the Academy of Southwest Louisiana (at present the Academy of Louisiana at Lafayette) in the mid-1960s and attended the Art Eye College of Design (and so in Los Angeles; now in Pasadena) from 1965 to 1967.
He returned to Louisiana in 1968. In 1976, he published his beginning book, "The Cajuns of George Rodrigue."
He died of cancer, his family said. Survivors include his wife, Wendy, and two sons, Jacques and Andre.
Mr. Rodrigue boasted that it was not uncommon for his Blue Dog paintings to sell for $25,000. Some were rumored to have sold for 10 times that.
He painted Bluish Dogs with presidents, with naked women in faux French scenes, on the lawn with his Aioli dining club party, inside a soup tin, in ads for Absolut Vodka and next to Marilyn Monroe (returning jabs, perhaps, at those who dismissed him as a Popular Art opportunist). Critics were non e'er impressed, but he said he did not care.
In later years Mr. Rodrigue painted other subjects, just he did not abandon Blueish Canis familiaris. He said he painted in role for the people who walked past his studio on Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
"You have to do something that really attracts the attending," he said in the WLAE interview. "I didn't start out doing that, but that'southward to fight for that audition. It'due south great. Information technology's actually great because it's a cross-section of the whole country here that walks down Royal Street, and the world."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/arts/design/george-rodrigue-artist-who-painted-blue-dog-dies-at-69.html
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