Rosalea Murphy, the Pink Adobe, and Paintings of Evergreen Lake

“She hates women.”

That’s the first thing George Rodrigue told me about Rosalea Murphy. He met her thirty years ago in Santa Fe, New Mexico at a gallery show of his Cajun paintings. They became close friends, and through her he met a slew of artists, actors, and musicians, a number of which he remains close to today. Nearly all of them were men. However, she also reluctantly introduced him to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and by accident (when she left him alone at the bar one afternoon) to a young Indian woman named Evergreen Lake. (pictured, Evergreen Lake, 1986 by George Rodrigue)

Our first Santa Fe visit together was in 1994. We’d been dating for just over a year, and George shared with me his American haunts on a cross-country drive that summer (a drive we’ve repeated every summer since). We walked into the Dragon Room Bar at the Pink Adobe early on a weekday afternoon. The room was nearly empty, except for a small woman at a round wooden table painted with dragons and planets and roosters.

Sitting on the bench on either side of her were two large dogs, Gina Lollobrigida and Don Juan, drinking from blue glass bowls bearing their names in silver paint. The accomplished flamenco guitarist Ruben Romero serenaded the trio from a barstool a few feet away.

Rosalea swooned when she saw George. Immediately she was full of questions about his Casanova friend and usual travel companion who, unknown to us, had been sending her love letters:

“Where is Romain? Does he ask for me? Why isn’t he with you?”

Don Juan moved closer to Gina so that George could sit closer to Rosalea. I stood and waited.

“Rosalea, this is Wendy.”

She ignored his introduction, and she ignored me, and I got the feeling that my presence represented Romain’s absence and so, before I’d even said hello, I was the enemy.

But a lifetime with an eccentric mother prepared me, and I was mesmerized by this tiny person with the enormous presence. At eighty-two years old, her eyes still shined and her hair, died jet black, hung around her shoulders. She dressed like a teenage country music star, in black velvet leggings, a hot pink blouse, a 4-inch silver “R” hanging from one ear and an “M” from the other and, most impressive, hand tooled and painted Falconhead cowboy boots. (pictured, Rosalea and the Dragon Room in an ad for Falconhead)

We walked across the courtyard to The Pink Adobe, a restaurant housed in a three hundred year old adobe building. In the 1940s Rosalea moved to Santa Fe from her hometown, New Orleans, and sold hamburgers from a vending cart on the street (the Old Santa Fe Trail), using the money she made at lunch to buy the meat for dinner. Within a few years she purchased the building and opened her own restaurant, The Pink Adobe, where she became famous for her gypsy stew, chicken enchiladas, and apple pie.

She also became famous for her paintings, filling the restaurant and bar with her tables and canvases. (pictured, Church at Trampas, 1952; Still Life, circa 1980, both by Rosalea Murphy)

When George stepped away, I dared to speak, asking her about the painting hanging above her head. She looked up:

“My friend Larry Hagman (as in I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas) told me a joke that was so funny, I had to paint it.”

“What was the joke?” I asked.

She looked me in the eye for the first time and said (as though testing me),

“What do you get when you cross an owl with a rooster?”

I stared back, and I grinned at that stubborn, charming soul, knowing we connected as she delivered the punch line,

“A ______ that stays up all night.”

(This is a g-rated blog. If you’re over 18 and can’t guess the missing four-letter word that rhymes with rock and clock and hollyhock, then you’re out of luck. If you’re under 18, you shouldn’t be guessing).

What looked like a price tag hung from the painting.

“Is it for sale?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to buy it, if that’s okay with you.”

George returned to the table, surprised to find us laughing and exchanging stories like old friends. I almost lost her that same night, however, when I asked about Georgia O’Keeffe. Rosalea disliked both O’Keeffe and her paintings, never understanding why anyone would care about her flowers and her skulls (as opposed to dragons and roosters, I suppose). She (along with many other notables) hung out at the bar at the Dragon Room. Rosalea cozied up to the presidents and male actors, but it’s a wonder that women still visited the place. She claimed to have thrown O’Keeffe and others out on numerous occasions for no reason other than that she hated them --- or, more likely, because they grabbed the attention of a passing man.

(Pictured: Georgia O’Keeffe, a puppet from our collection, created by Santa Fe artist Armand Lara)

George told me later that he almost lost Rosalea too, when he approached Evergreen Lake at the bar during a visit in 1985 and arranged to photograph her the following day. He saw a particular look in this beautiful young Indian woman, and although they never met again (out of respect for Rosalea), he used the photographs from that afternoon in dozens of paintings over the years. She became for him another Evangeline or Jolie Blonde and appears in his work not only as herself, a native American woman, but also as a Cajun traiteur, or healer. (all paintings below by George Rodrigue, painted between 1986 and 1989)

He also incorporated her into the Blue Dog Series. (pictured: Speaking to the Wind, also called I Went to the Graveyard to Hide From the Blues 1992; She Added Color to My Life 1995; Santa Fe On My Mind 1997, all by George Rodrigue)

As I carried my rooster and owl painting down the street and towards our hotel, I enjoyed delirious success. And as for George, he could barely believe this conquest (and even tried to reimburse me the $400 for the painting!)

Over the years we grew very close to Rosalea. Through her we met and became friends with several amazing artists, including Armand Lara and Doug Magnus, whose works appear in this blog, as well as Scott Wayne Emmerich of Falconhead boots (you might remember that George performed the gris-gris with his hand-made Mardi Gras boots a few weeks ago). It was special for me to witness these creative pow-wows, as Rosalea and ‘her men’ encouraged each other in the arts. Eventually George and Doug would collaborate on a collection of Blue Dog Jewelry.

(pictured, a jewelry line by Doug Magnus celebrating the 400th anniversary of Santa Fe)

Beginning in 1995 we stayed for a week each summer in her apartment above the Pink Adobe, where we awoke to purple bedding and pink walls and five-foot sunflowers, all complementing the view of the Church of San Miguel (1610), the oldest church structure in America, and located directly across the street from the restaurant. If we happened to be in town on a Wednesday, we joined Rosalea and her merry bunch in the apartment for poker. It was then that I learned that I wasn’t the only woman in her life. As long as the men fawned on her first and the women understood their place, then they were welcome. Her family, namely her daughter and granddaughter, were exceptions to the understanding, and they enjoyed her sustaining devotion and pride regardless of any unstated rules for the rest of us.

Rosalea’s daughter, Priscilla Hoback, is also a remarkable artist. George and I especially enjoy her works in clay, like Adam and Eve, pictured below, which hangs in our courtyard.

Rosalea Murphy died in 2000. She was buried wearing her “R” and “M” earrings, made by Doug Magnus, along with her custom made Scott Wayne boots. George and I still struggle to visit the Pink Adobe, often avoiding it in fact, because the popular restaurant and bar (now run by her grandson and his family) seems empty without Rosalea and her dogs. We pay tribute to her with the four paintings in our collection (including the ones pictured in this blog), as well as a prized painted table and large pots of sunflowers in the summer.

On those rare occasions that we do stop into the Dragon Room and visit with ‘Rosalea’s men,’ I remember my place, hanging back a bit, watching these talented artists as they visit about old times, current projects, and especially the strong woman who loved them and brought them together.

Wendy

pictured above: Doug Magnus, Armand Lara, George Rodrigue, photographed in 2008 by Dana Waldon

note: I have a million pictures somewhere of Rosalea but just can't put my hands on them. I will add more as I come across them, but I think she'd agree that the Falconhead ad does her adequate justice in the meantime.

Painting to the Frame

As long as I can remember, George Rodrigue has talked about his sporadic but serious interest in ‘painting to the frame,’ a phrase he coined himself as far as I can tell. Although most of the time his paintings and frames are unrelated to each other (in fact, I recall him asking our framer, “Make the frame go away” so as not to distract from the painting), occasionally George comes across a frame that dictates the design, color, and even imagery on his canvas.

Upon his return from art school in the late 1960s, George faced the challenge of earning a living, while determined to paint full time and avoid a ‘real job.’ He not only saved money by thinning his paints, but also by purchasing old frames at junk shops and flea markets throughout the South. Custom ordering was out of the question, and yet he wanted the massive gilded and wooden frames to add importance, weight, and interest to his landscapes. At twenty-five years old, he wanted his paintings to look like they’d hung on the wall of the Louvre. (pictured, Rodrigue in 1969 and 2009, with paintings from those same years)

In some cases the frame was so interesting that George spent more time restoring it, often stripping paint, oiling the wood, or cleaning the details with small brushes, than he did on his painting. This is true of two small landscapes (11x14 inches each) from 1969. In both cases he painted his canvas to carved cypress frames that he had stripped of their gilding.

This was extremely labor intensive, and he used to work on the frames for days before beginning his painting. Rarely have I seen George as disappointed as when he purchased back the 1969 painting Bayou Country House (pictured below) at auction several years ago.

He had spent many hours stripping the 24x30 inch cypress wood before painting to the frame, and yet the man who originally bought the work (for $150!) applied a pale grey house paint, which he felt better matched the oil painting. Although it would be easy today to pay to have this paint removed (and in fact we did have the painting itself restored by a conservationist recently), it hangs as is on our living room wall, a reminder of struggles with clients and their preferences; a reminder that the art takes on a life of its own, depending on where it hangs and how it's studied and talked about, beyond the artist and his intent.

That said, it wouldn’t surprise me to find George sitting at the dining room table, deep in thought, stripping the paint himself late one night.

George’s most famous image painted to the frame is the Aioli Dinner (1971). He found this 32x46 inch frame at Bob’s Junk Shop in Lafayette, Louisiana, and it inspired both the size and greenish color of the painting (for the history of this painting visit its blog; to see the painting with frame in person, visit the New Orleans of Museum of Art, where it hangs currently at the top of the Grand Staircase, to the right).

Although shadows make it difficult to see in a photograph (even one as excellent as this, courtesy of Judy Cooper at NOMA), one side of the frame is considerably darker than the other. This is because when George found it, the frame held a vertical portrait (a photograph, under glass, of President McKinley), and the dirt gathered on one edge for decades before he turned the canvas horizontal for his purposes.

Today we have a framer on staff, and George prefers most of his works custom framed with a contemporary and simple molding that, as much as possible, remains invisible. However, that’s not always the case, and although he doesn’t set out to find the frames anymore, he still comes across them on occasion and creates a painting to the frame. (pictured, The Blue Room, 2009, inspired by the famous supper club in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans)

Five years ago on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, we came across four huge (8x5 feet) ‘running dog’ frames made in India. The wood was painted with pale colors of red, blue, and green, and the frames were intended for mirrors. Ironically (if you recall his dismay with the painted frame of his 1969 painting Bayou Country House), George purchased the frames with plans to re-paint them himself and use them for paintings. Just this month he created Color Me Young for a ‘running dogs’ frame, spending several days afterwards painting the wood. So in this case, he painted his design to the frame, but then painted the frame to the painting. (pictured, George at his easel; frame detail; Jacques Rodrigue with Color Me Young, 2010)

To many, the notion of ‘painting to the frame’ (as well as the notion of writing or reading about it) may sound boring. However, it is another reminder of George’s inventiveness and, most endearing to my mind, his inherent and natural devotion to his own rules of painting (hard edges, graphic interpretations of his culture, strong design, repetitive imagery, etc; for details, visit any of the Blue Dog or Cajun entries listed in this blog archive) ---- the same rules he set for himself more than forty years ago.

The same can be said for George in life, actually, and I believe it’s the reason he’s described so often as down-to-earth. Not only is he still painting to the frame, he’s also still reciting the Eagle Scout creed….

So why did he wait five years to paint to the running-dogs frame? Well, he had nowhere to hang an eight-foot, eighty pound picture, and let’s face it, it’s just not any fun if he can’t show it off! But as he paints for the new 3,000 square foot gallery on Royal Street (opening with a weekend celebration this March), size is no longer an issue. He has room to install almost anything, and you can expect to see (or not see) not only invisible, contemporary moldings, but also gilded, ornate, antique frames, and of course, running dogs.

Wendy

Red Dog

The Red Dog first appeared in 1990 about the time George Rodrigue started re-thinking the loup-garou, turning it into an entity beyond a Cajun legend, turning it slowly into something else.

You may remember from the blog Blue Dog: In the Beginning, 1984-1989 that George changed the red eyes of the early loup-garou paintings to a less ominous yellow, as the image developed into the Blue Dog. Yet a part of him missed the werewolf myth, and for several years the yellow-eyed dog appeared exclusively in cemeteries, featuring the same dark night sky that inspired the blue fur from the beginning. Occasionally he took this to an extreme with paintings such as Devil Dog (1990, oil on canvas).

As a result, the darker roots remained alive on his canvas, and for sometime he experimented with illustrations of good (as symbolized by the Blue Dog) and evil (as symbolized by the Red Dog). Usually he kept this pretty light, and I recall in the gallery explaining the Red Dog as “the devil in her,” or “Tiffany’s mischievous side.” (pictured, The Devil in Me, silkscreen from 1991, and The Blues Can Hide a Bad Apple, oil on canvas from 1992).

George, however, rarely spoke of the Blue Dog as ‘Tiffany’ (even though, ironically, he says she was a somewhat mean little dog), but rather described the image itself as having a “split personality” or an “alter ego.” (pictured, Split Personality; Mischief On My Mind, original silkscreens from 1991 and 1992).

By the mid-1990s I remember explaining the Red Dog not as 'Tiffany's mischievous side,' but rather 'George's.' (Three Dog Night, 1993, 36x48, below)….

…something that seemed even more obvious from his painting titles. (My Mood Changes, 2005, 20x24; Bad Thoughts, 2000, 36x24; Angel on My Shoulder, 2006, 36x115)

Eventually the Red Dog took on patriotic symbolism… (Caught in the Fifties, 2000, 24x30)

…and references to love (She Stole My Burning Heart, 2007, 30x40)

But above all else, as I’ve described repeatedly throughout these blogs, George’s interest lies in creating something interesting to his eye ----something that does not have all of the answers, but rather poses questions about life, while at the same time leaving no doubt as to each composition’s deliberate design and George Rodrigue’s passion for and study of color.

In art school his professors described him as a “colorist,” an ironic title when one considers his black oak trees from the 1970s. Yet he’s often told me that even a painting as monochromatic (and dark) as the Aioli Dinner required a palette full of color. George’s change from oil paint to acrylics in the early 1990s made his love for primary colors more obvious, and over the years his canvases have grown brighter and brighter.

Today, twenty years after the first Red Dog painting, people approach George’s work with statements like “Oh, I see he’s painting Red Dogs now,” as though it’s some new twist on the Blue Dog paintings.

And then there’s my favorite exclamation, “Look at that! It’s a red Blue Dog!” (The Red-headed Stranger, 2009, 72x48)

Or a pink Blue Dog! (Pink-a-boo, 2007, 60x40)

Or a golden Blue Dog! (My Gold Pet, 2006, 20x24)

Today he paints the Blue Dog in all colors. As he says in the children’s book, Why is Blue Dog Blue? (published 2003, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York),

“Artists don’t have to paint things the way they really are. I use my imagination to paint my own world. I can paint a dog any color I can imagine.”

If you think of it this way, then suddenly the Red Dog, no longer the ‘alter ego’ or the ‘devil in him,’ seems as natural as ….well ….. Blue.

As detailed throughout these blogs, George Rodrigue has only a few consistencies in his art: his attention to strong design, his understanding of color, his original ideas, and his change or growth as an artist. This is why the Blue Dog paintings, so often mis-interpreted as the same from canvas to canvas or year to year, require so many entries (although in some ways the paintings of later years come to look more like the original silkscreens of earlier years, but I'll touch on this more in a silkscreen blog down the road).

Within this “Red Dog blog,” however, the entire development plays out on one page. I hope it provides an obvious understanding of why it took George twenty years of change and growth to get from Devil Dog (size 20x24, 1990) pictured at the beginning of this entry to Color Me Young (size 42x78, 2010), pictured below.

Wendy

Who Dat! …. Plus Voodoo, Cow Heads, and DC Mardi Gras

I awoke at 5:30 this morning to the screams of “Who Dat!” hollered from our sidewalk as though I were Stella herself giving up on the half sleep that comes from tumultuous relationships and reignited passion.

I awoke in a city blissfully plagued with hangovers and swollen eyes and strained vocal chords. (Maybe you did too? Our New York and Irish friends called after the game to report their evening exercise ---- jumping around the living room, followed by sazeracs at the local pub). It’s “Who Dat” insanity, and since I was reminded in Washington D.C. this week that I shouldn’t assume that all the world knows these Louisiana peculiarities (everyone from our cab drivers, to the maitre de at the Old Ebbitt Grill to the director of the Hirshhorn asked me for help), here’s the real thing (I leave you with the fun of translating):

“Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? WHO DAT?! WHO DAT?!”

I had a ticket, but I gave it up. Sounds crazy to you, right? But not really. I went last week and am still high on the experience of hugging strangers, of screaming like life itself depended on stopping the other team at that third down, of gripping my seat (and my chest) until the bitter end, just terrified something would go wrong (“If only they can get ahead by five touchdowns; then we’ll be safe….”). Like last night, I found it impossible to eat or drink, as the knots in my stomach took over. It’s a game, and yet God’s loudspeaker might as well have just announced world peace. I’ve never seen this town (or any place) so happy. (pictured Gus Anderson, Dickie Hebert, Jacques Rodrigue, George Rodrigue, Wayne Fernandez)

Douglas, the Rodrigue Gallery’s all-around take-care-of-everything person for the past twenty years went in my place, accompanying George as they high-fived police officers and hot dog vendors and the Governor himself. (pictured, Douglas Shiell and George Rodrigue in their seersucker suits, New Orleans, summer 2009)

Following the game, as I sat on the couch with the phone stuck to my ear and the Kleenex box in my lap, George ran inside to recount every play for me as though I hadn’t seen a thing. When he realized I recorded it, he opened a beer and shouted at the television until the wee hours. It was just one of those nights. (pictured, Rodrigue with Drew Brees, 2008; raising money for the Brees Dream Foundation; Rodrigue's portrait of quarterback Drew Brees from 2007; Rodrigue with Brittany and Drew Brees, 2009)

To my surprise I learned this past week that football and yoga don’t generally go together. There I was in a workshop and not only was I the only one who attended the game, but also I was the only one who watched it, or in some cases even knew that they won and what it meant. Okay, so I’m probably putting the words ‘football’ and namaste (loosely translated, ‘honoring the spirit within another person’) in a sentence together for the first time in history, but I can’t help but see this phenomenon ----this team bringing together a city that struggles with race relations and corruption and poverty and crime (and potholes) together in a celebration the likes of which even this party town has never known, and doing it all inside of the Superdome, a structure that just over four years ago held immense suffering.

This victory symbolizes the continued healing of a deep and painful wound ---- a wound that remains fresh here long after the rest of the world thinks we moved on (or, most distressful, that we’ll never recover). It’s as if the doctor at long last visited the waiting room and told the New Orleans family, “I’ve got great news. She’s going to pull through.”

As I listened to the ‘Who Dat’s’ and the car horns early this morning, I developed this blog in my head (replacing the “Red Dog” and “Bill Clinton” stories started last week) with not only thoughts of the game, but also various musings from what turned out to be a compelling week on many levels. However, the Saints victory is such a big deal that, let’s face it, no one really cares about the rest. Nevertheless, I’ll reduce my head’s runaway ramble to a few short lines and some pictures:

We visited Washington D.C. (returning bright and early yesterday to catch the game) where we attended the annual Krewe of Louisiana’s Mardi Gras Ball, a three-day event hosted for 5,000 Louisiana visitors in the Washington Hilton.

I was going to tell you all about the Marine Marching Band and the Louisiana Festival Queens, and the floats and beads and dancing, along with a few memories of George Rodrigue’s reign as King in 1994. (Pictured, King George in both his formal and casual attire!)

I wanted to cover our fascinating visit to the Hirshhorn Museum, where we learned about the challenges of conserving Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde-soaked cow heads, delighted in stories about stealthy employees spinning Calder mobiles in the night, and viewed Phoebe Greenberg’s short film (and Cannes Award winner) “Next Floor” ---not to be missed.

I hoped to share a story about four-term Louisiana state Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc and his Hadacol Caravan (briefly referenced in the blog Jimmy Domengeaux and Other Louisiana Characters), inspired by a lengthy conversation this weekend with his grandson Byron LeBlanc who was also in Washington. Byron unwittingly sent me off on another tangent, however, when he asked about his friend, songwriter Bobby Charles from LeBlanc’s hometown of Abbeville, Louisiana. Charles died last week at age seventy-one, but his legacy remains with hits like “Walking to New Orleans” (recorded by Fats Domino) and “See Ya’ Later Alligator” (recorded by Bill Haley and the Comets).

I never met Bobby Charles. George tells me he became a recluse in his later years, first living on the Vermillion River near Maurice, Louisiana, and later in Holly Beach, until Katrina took his modest home in 2005, sending him back to Abbeville. In 1987 George painted his portrait. He wanted to be immortalized not just through his music, but with an image of the strongest and longest love he’d known. And so behind the adult Bobby, George painted the baby Bobby cuddled by his mother.

And finally, I’ll share a little tale of voodoo. It’s rare that George shocks me anymore, but he got me good with this one. The Washington Mardi Gras attracts visitors from the entire state of Louisiana (New Orleans, ironically, is the least represented). We enjoy going because we see folks there that we might otherwise not see at all, considering how seldom we make it to Shreveport or Alexandria or Plaquemine’s Parish. This year George came across an old rival, one who handed out his business cards and cozied up to George and the rest of us at an event one evening as though the past never happened and the two were best friends. This public fawning riled George more than I realized. The following day at lunch, he announced to the large table,

“I’m puttin’ the gris-gris on him.”

And with that, he pulled out the man's business card, covered it with table salt, folded it into tiny pieces, and stomped on it under the heels of his Mardi Gras boots.

I never knew he had it in him. (and I shudder to think about the response in my yoga class!)

In closing, I want to thank you for reading these blogs and giving me a venue to share a sentence that I (along with tens of thousands of others) have been waiting to say and to write my entire life:

...........drumroll...........

“The New Orleans Saints are going to the Super Bowl.”

WHO DAT?!!!!!!!!!!

Wendy

(pictured above with my favorite Saints player, Mike McKenzie, who is unfortunately not playing much these days due to injuries; photo courtesy Michael C. Hebert)

I First Loved Picasso

As a kid, sometime around age twelve, I discovered my mother’s art books. She protected her prized tomes within plastic covers, locked behind the glass doors of a large, bright yellow wooden bookcase. Her collection included overviews of the Renaissance, Ancient Greece, and Lost Worlds, as well as Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Rubens, Durer, and Michelangelo ---all massive books she purchased while an art student at LSU around 1960.

Art books are expensive, and back in those days her family (an overnight success story in the oil industry in the mid-1950s) had the money to support the whims they understood, such as fashion and cars (in my mother’s case, a yearly new Cadillac convertible), as well as the whims they never understood --- her major in Fine Arts and her collection of art books.

By the time my sister and I appeared, the money was gone, the dresses relegated to a ‘costume closet,’ and the cars long sold. But the art books remained (and remain) protected and precious. Among them is a boxed set of linen-covered monographs of ‘modern’ artists. These include Klee, Kandinsky, Dali, Braque, and my favorite, Picasso (pictured).

Pablo Picasso died in France in the spring of 1973. I was a young child, but I recall my mother showing me his work and talking about this ‘creative genius.’ Her hero-worship affected me, and the artist rose even higher on that pedestal when my elementary school art teachers chose him for our studies. Looking back, they probably found Picasso more accessible to young students than the more ‘lofty’ Abstract Expressionism of the day, as typified by artists like Motherwell and de Kooning. (Pop Art, as far as I can tell, was either not yet understood or not yet taken seriously enough to be worthy of the classroom).

Ironically, a decade earlier, as George Rodrigue studied art in Lafayette and Los Angeles, he too faced the lingering academic art of the day, Abstract Expressionism. Yet it was Pop Art, a movement dismissed by his teachers, which made the biggest impression on him during these years. (See the blog Art School: Lafayette and Los Angeles, 1962-1967)

When I reached high school and later studied Art History in college, I recall Picasso as practically vilified in academic circles. There was talk that he hadn’t done anything worthy of study since Cubism or Guernica, and that he ‘lost his touch’ as an old man, floundering between grotesque figures and half-hearted revisits of his earlier styles. (below, a late Picasso)

Rather than discourage me, these criticisms made me more curious, and I poured through my mother’s books searching for the answers --- hoping to train my own eye to see the master’s downfall in his artwork.

Yet I saw only brilliance.

I returned to his simplest images repeatedly, and I wondered: Why should this picture be in a book? Why should he call it finished? What could it possibly mean? Why do I come back to it again and again? (pictured, A Bull on canvas by Picasso, and below that, a Face on ceramic)

And finally, why is it that I would give up all my worldly possessions to own a simple Picasso drawing when even I, who can’t so much as draw a daisy, could probably produce a fair copy?

It was during this time that ‘art’ took on specific meanings for me. I became an art snob in my circle-of-one. I gained freedom of thought, and I dared to look at art in my own way.

Little did I know that I was training for my future life with an artist, not only to study the work itself (for my own appreciation of what George has done in the past, for the projects currently on his easel, and for his unwillingness to retrace old ground); but also to face both the obvious insults (“my 8 year-old kid could paint that!”) as well as the disguised ones (“Rodrigue is a brilliant businessman, a marketing genius!”*)

* George insists that I’m overly sensitive in this area and that most people don’t see this attitude as a negative. Perhaps he’s right, but it still places me on the defensive. (pictured, Untitled Sketch by Rodrigue 1994)

Picasso’s whole life --- the Blue Period, Cubism, the African paintings, and so much more --- is inside his simplest works. Had he painted them all at age nineteen, they would mean nothing. But at age ninety, they mean everything. The fact that he probably painted some in a matter of minutes or that second grade students everywhere can duplicate some of his most abstracted designs is irrelevant.

I asked George about Picasso, and he pulled a well-worn book, Goodbye Picasso, (by David Douglas Duncan, Grosset & Dunlap, 1974) from the shelf, turned to a bookmarked page (pictured below) and said:

“I remember how messy his house was, and I was so impressed.”

He also describes an art school assignment at the Art Center College of Design, in which he was ‘to create a painting in the style of an old master.’ George chose a guitar and collage, ala Picasso. (pictured on top, a Picasso "Guitar" from 1912; below, Rodrigue's "Guitar" from 1965)

I’ve told George for years that he’s Picasso in many classrooms --- not the same artist and not the same talent, but a similar inspiration to what I recall from my own school years. It’s all so familiar (and somewhat unsettling), as though I’ll look up at my mother’s books and see “Rodrigue” not on a shiny new book, but on the worn-out titles and the plastic-covered jackets. (It’s the same eerie feeling I had at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where their memorabilia room held George’s various personal items --- the same things I see everyday in our house).

Unsurprisingly, as George grows older the critics take notice of his early works, the same pieces they denounced not only as he painted them, but for thirty years following. (Consider Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, reviled in its day, and now considered his masterpiece; consider George’s first review, “Artist Paints Dreary, Monotonous Oaks” (from the Baton Rouge Advocate), the same works that today many in this region’s academic art world claim are his best). (pictured, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d' Avignon from 1907; Rodrigue's Louisiana: The State We Live In from 1972)

Again, I’m comparing the two artist’s situations, not their actual artwork. Also, keep in mind that one coveted the world’s approval, while the other hoped for the approval of his artistic peers in his home state.

And yet again and again I hear from teachers and students that George is the only living artist on their syllabus. They study his Blue Dog paintings alongside Monet’s Water Lilies, Van Gogh’s Self-portraits, and even Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Just as my teachers found Picasso more accessible to young students than the abstract expressionists, today’s teachers may choose Rodrigue over conceptual, installation, and ‘intellectual’ artists for the same reason.

Like Picasso, George Rodrigue reinvents himself. Most artists hope for one unique series of work discernible as their own. And yet both Picasso and Rodrigue accomplished this multiple times. They both recognized the importance of a unique idea.

This is the only real comparison I dare to make between Picasso and Rodrigue --- and it in no way links their actual artwork. To go further would be overly presumptuous on my part and would invite criticism the likes of which I am unable (and unwilling) to combat. (George too would be mortified by my gall in doing so). I am only drawing the connection between Picasso’s unwitting participation in my discovery of art as a child and what I know for a fact to be George’s similar role in classrooms today.

George, although extremely confident in his art, is uncomfortable with his artistic legacy (and particularly any link to the masters). He’s still working towards it and, more than anything, hoping for it. (pictured, Mars Candy Bar, 2009, oil on canvas, 48x36 inches)

"It took me a whole lifetime to learn how to draw like a child again." - Pablo Picasso

Wendy

Reagan, Bush, and Gorbachev: A Story

By the mid-1980s George Rodrigue had a significant national reputation as a fine artist. Ironically, although his paintings depicted the landscapes and people of South Louisiana, his work garnered little serious attention at home, where the locals associated him with festival posters and black trees.

Elsewhere in the country, however, his reputation flourished, particularly following the publication of the book The Cajuns of George Rodrigue in 1976 (Oxmoor House, Birmingham, Alabama), which attracted the attention of the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as First Lady Rosalyn Carter, who chose the book as an official Gift of State during President Jimmy Carter’s administration.

Furthermore, despite his protestations (see the blog, Portraits: The Kingfish and Uncle Earl), George attracted attention as a portrait artist --- specifically, an American portrait artist --- his work viewed as naïve, a quality associated with an increasingly popular American genre, folk art.

In 1988 the National Republican Party (through the Assistant Secretary of Energy, Henson Moore) commissioned George Rodrigue to paint President Ronald Reagan. Because this was a more casual portrait, as opposed to the official and formal Presidential portrait, George had carte blanche when it came to design and approach.

He chose the theme “An American Hero," because to him Ronald Reagan, the actor, the cowboy, and the President of the United States represented a specific American ideal. To prepare, he flew to the President’s ranch in California to photograph him on his horse. Little did he know that he would be one of two hundred photographers scheduled for shoots that day.

As President and Mrs. Reagan rode towards the waiting cameras, George dismayed. Reagan’s horse was not the proud stallion of our country’s leader, but rather looked 'like an old mule, with a lazy gait and a drooping head.’ He returned home with several dozen disappointing shots (remember, this was long before digital photography).

As I’ve mentioned in other stories, George excels in what some might see as difficult or even impossible situations. In this case, the solution was simple. He poured through his old cowboy books (he has an amazing collection of source material on a wide variety of subjects), found a great picture of Gene Autry on his horse Champion, and replaced the singing cowboy’s head with Ronald Reagan’s.

The Republican Party leaders, as well as President and Mrs. Reagan were pleased with the work, and as a result arranged for George to present the painting to the President twice, during public ceremonies in New Orleans and in Baton Rouge. (pictured, Rodrigue with President Reagan in Baton Rouge; Patrick F. Taylor with President Reagan in New Orleans)

Following the New Orleans presentation, George noticed the painting still sitting on the stage long after the President’s departure, and so he loaded it into his van and headed to a friend’s house for dinner. Imagine his surprise when the Secret Service tracked him down with a phone call:

“Mr Rodrigue, do you have the President’s portrait? We are holding Air Force One.”

George raced in 5:00 traffic to the New Orleans airport and the waiting plane (and the waiting President). He drove directly to the airplane door, where the Secret Service loaded the canvas, and he watched from his van as, within minutes, the plane took off.

In May 1988, George Rodrigue presented an exhibition of his works, including the painting An American Hero, at the Summit Meeting in Moscow. As a companion piece to President Reagan’s portrait, he painted the President of the former Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The paintings hung side by side at the Sovereign Center World Trade Center complex, along with ten other Rodrigue paintings, all borrowed from collectors.

The portraits of Reagan and Gorbachev caused controversy from the beginning. The KGB wanted to know,

“Why isn’t Gorbachev on a horse too? Why is he standing on the ground, as though begging?”

George explained that he painted Gorbachev as he described himself in his propaganda: “a man of the people.” His hand was not extended for help, but rather as a gesture of welcoming and goodwill.

And as far as the horse, George replied,

“I didn’t know that Gorbachev had a horse.”

The KGB responded,

“He doesn’t. We were hoping Reagan would give him a horse.”

(Fortunately they did not notice the Cajun artist’s little joke painted on Gorbachev's head: he shaped the Soviet President's famous birthmark like a crawfish).

The controversy continued as Soviet officials requested that George give the original painting to Gorbachev. He agreed, provided he could meet the Soviet President and present the painting in person. The KGB refused, insisting George give up the portrait. But George held his ground, and within a day the entire exhibition of paintings, including both the Reagan and Gorbachev portraits, disappeared. (pictured, George Rodrigue in Moscow with his painting Kiss Me, I'm Cajun)

The press, in Moscow for the Summit, picked up on the story with headlines such as “Soviets Lasso Artwork: Officials Seize Painting of President as Cowboy” (Associated Press), “Painting of Reagan as Cowboy Corralled by Soviet Authorities” (Los Angeles Times), “Kremlin Nixes Cajun Painter’s Gorby Portrait” (New Art Examiner), and “Rebel Cajun Painter” (The New Orleans Times-Picayune). The missing paintings, in fact, became the number one Associated Press story for three days in a row that May.

The extensive press surrounding the paintings’ disappearance embarrassed the Soviets, and within days the paintings reappeared on the wall as mysteriously as they vanished. George, anxious to leave town (and worried also because, with the exception of Gorbachev’s portrait, these works did not belong to him), made arrangements to return to Louisiana that day. However, the KGB issued him new departure papers, stipulating that he was to leave as soon as possible but that the paintings, all of them, were to remain in Moscow.

Once again excelling in a crisis, George came up with a plan. In the middle of the night, with the help of an ABC News crew, he removed the paintings from their stretchers and rolled them together. The news crew hid them in a beer cooler on Air Force Two, and within days George retrieved the paintings from their offices in Washington D.C.

Upon its return to Washington D.C., Reagan’s portrait hung first in the White House and later in the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, until Nancy Reagan donated it upon his death to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in honor of Reagan supporter Lod Cook, where it hangs on public display in the Lod Cook Alumni Center. (LSU does loan it out on occasion, most recently to the Louisiana Governor's Mansion, where it hangs today in the office of Governor Bobby Jindal.)

And what of the portrait of Gorbachev? Needless to say, George did not leave it in Moscow. He kept the work himself and occasionally hangs it in our home or loans it out for exhibition (especially if the Reagan painting also is on view).

(I first saw it in 1993 at George’s camp in Butte la Rose, Louisiana, where it hung over the bed in the guest room.)

Later in 1988 the Republican Party, specifically George’s friend Lee Atwater, called George for another favor. Vice President George H.W. Bush hoped the artist would paint his portrait as well.

At Bush’s request, George painted a casual portrait of the Vice President with his ten grandchildren.

He presented the painting to then President Bush during a private meeting in Los Angeles the following year, and it hung in the White House throughout his Presidency.

Not long after he finished the painting, Mrs. Bush’s aide called George at his studio in Lafayette, Louisiana:

“Mrs. Bush requests that you add her to the painting.”

It was with sincere regret that George declined. As I’ve repeated throughout these blogs, his paintings consist of strong designs, so that moving or changing any element destroys the ‘puzzle.’ He could not include Mrs. Bush in the finished painting without ruining his composition. He reluctantly admitted,

“There simply is no room.”

Today the painting of President George H.W. Bush with his ten grandchildren hangs in his personal office in his home in Houston, Texas. In 2007 he agreed to loan it for the first time for public display for the retrospective exhibition Blue Dog: The Art of George Rodrigue at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

In closing, lest the Democrats out there worry that George Rodrigue is a die-hard Republican, please stand by. His painting of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore calls for its own detailed story. That painting too resulted in controversy and adventure, and I will share the details with you sometime in the coming weeks.

Wendy

Assessing This Blog (Taking a Breath)

“But just imagine, my dear…! A whole periodical devoted to one person’s opinions! I would never have believed it possible!” (from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke)

It’s the wee hours, and I’m blogging again, unable to sleep, to quiet my mind, because I’m retracing the Reagan and Gorbachev paintings in one minute and recalling George’s mother’s unfiltered (“You got fat, huh?”) and charmingly foggy (“That Ed Sullivan looks good for his age!”) brain in the next.

It seems I’m addicted to sharing my ‘musings,’ a rather vain exercise no matter what the subject, and the yogi in me takes little comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one out there blogging.

I still feel a bit exposed, even vulnerable, as I share our photographs and memories with strangers. And yet I’m encouraged by the number of readers (two thousand of you this week alone!) and even more so by your comments. Thank you for reading, and thank you for writing in.

The interest in this blog surprises me. I thought everyone already knew all of this stuff! We’ve printed countless biography hand-outs over the years, listed detailed timelines on our website, lectured to audiences across the country, written ten books, and spoken to thousands of gallery visitors. Before starting this project four months ago, I actually worried that blogging about George Rodrigue would be redundant!

Yet somehow, even people who’ve followed his career for years did not know that George went to art school in Los Angeles, that he’s made a successful living as an artist for more than forty years (no overnight rags-to-riches story here), that his family was in the tomb business, that the Blue Dog is based on a Cajun legend, that the Aioli Dinner is not a family reunion, that (my sweet mother’s romantic mysticism aside) I am not Jolie Blonde, that George painted a series of seventy abstract paintings called Hurricanes (the reaction to which prompted this blog entry), that he painted the Hurricanes three years before Hurricane Katrina, and that it’s been nearly a decade since George lived in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Locals, particularly those from Lafayette, claim George as their own, a notion both endearing and annoying. I remember years ago working in Carmel with Sandra Crake (who is originally from Baton Rouge and still works in the Carmel gallery after nineteen years), arguing over who would deal with the next ‘Lafayette know-it-all’ that walked through the door. Without exception, these folks assumed that Sandra and I were uninformed and, worse, that we were from California! What could we possibly share with them about George Rodrigue that they didn’t already know? Had we even met him?

When I reminded George of this, he too admitted his disillusionment:

“I went to New Orleans to open a gallery, to show my art, and just to have a presence in a community as an artist, because in Lafayette, no one paid attention.”

Blogging, this on-line personal magazine, gets the word (and pictures) out in such a way that folks do pay attention. I’m not sure why this works, but I’m grateful for the readership, and (for now, anyway) I’m hooked. As a result, these days, rather than bristling my feathers, I’m increasingly appreciative of the Lafayette and New Iberia contingencies --- those folks who remember Bud Petro sitting on the Jefferson Street gallery porch (and barking, “You coming to look or to buy?”) or George jacking up his house fifteen feet in the air to build a second floor underneath. Maybe you actually met Tiffany! (pictured below, crossing the road in front of the Rodrigue family's raised home)

Perhaps you bought a painting from the trunk of George’s car, or recall the day Coach Blanco (or Brother Isidore, for that matter) threw him out of class for drawing. Maybe you rode across the country with George in the blue van and helped him put up a show in Boston or Houston or Jackson, Mississippi. Maybe you saved a bottle of Jolie Blonde Beer or found an old Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival poster in your attic.

Whatever the connection, your stories are as good as mine (and in some cases better). Thank you for sharing them. (pictured, Bud Petro, with Diane Bernard Keogh as Evangeline)

What surprises (and pleases) me the most about reactions to this blog is the people that previously associated George with one thing ---the Blue Dog--- but now understand that he is (and always has been) unpredictable in his art. He loves “wondrous varieties,”* and his canvas, from Landscapes to Cajuns to Blue Dogs to Portraits to Hurricanes to Bodies, to other series I haven’t touched on yet like Reflections and River Paintings and Pop Candy reflects his changing interests, even within those particular series (consider the difference between Blue Dog paintings from 1992 and Blue Dog paintings from 2002).

In fact, if there’s any pattern at all, it’s that from the beginning, from those early Pop Art years in Los Angeles, the things around George affect his art. He creates and changes based on associations, based on things happening right now in his life. He doesn’t retrace old ground.

Looking back at the stories in this blog, I think that sharing this variety and its inspirations has been its greatest accomplishment, and, although I’m aware of the dangers, this realization should keep me on track.

And yet…

To finish Ms. Clarke’s quote (from the beginning of this entry) regarding ‘a whole periodical devoted to one’s opinions’:

“She will consider it the most natural thing in the world. Her vanity is beyond any thing.”*

Heavy sigh…

Wendy

*Azeem, the ‘painted man,’ (played by Morgan Freeman) explains the color of his skin to a young child: “Allah loves wondrous varieties.” (from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991)

*I replaced the pronoun “he” with “she” from page 114 in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004.

Hurricanes, A Series of Paintings

By late summer 2002 George Rodrigue and I lived most of the time in Carmel, California. We placed our house on the market in Lafayette, Louisiana, but still spent time there on occasion as we waited for a buyer. By coincidence, we were in Lafayette for Hurricane Lili.

I recall an argument with George about evacuation:

“What do you mean we’re not leaving?”

“I’ve never evacuated in my life,” said the New Iberia, Louisiana native.

I, on the other hand, having grown up on Okaloosa Island in Fort Walton Beach, Florida weighed the importance of my life versus my marriage, as I decided whether or not to take Diana (our cat) and get out of town without my husband.

My mother grew up in New Orleans and recalled horror stories from Hurricanes Audrey and Betsy, and later the devastation caused by Camille in nearby Biloxi, Mississippi. As a result, my sister and I evacuated with her four or five times every summer throughout the 1970s and 1980s--- essentially, each time a hurricane entered the Gulf of Mexico --- the car packed with photo albums, the Persian carpet, three hamsters and two birds, all of which (except the animals), remained in the trunk from July through September.

Against my better judgment, I stayed. To console me, George took me to the garage and showed me his contraption (this is so typical of him). He hooked the car up to an external battery and installed a small television so that we’d receive local news updates after losing power. It took everything I had not to roll my eyes when the television stations, also without power, went off the air.

Today, after thirteen years of marriage, I know enough strategy to trick him into evacuating, but back then I was still a naïve bride!

Our friend Blake stayed with us, having house-sat since our move to Carmel. Together we (George, Blake, Diana, and myself) watched wide-eyed as this storm moved into the area.

For some reason I took it for granted that hurricanes hit at night --- this unseen, noisy, powerful monster that leaves pandemonium in the morning light. But Lili struck in the middle of the day, and we stood in our kitchen bay window (like idiots) watching patio furniture fly down the street, sections of roofs tumble through the air like something out of The Wizard of Oz, and eighty foot trees bow low to the ground. At one point we lost Diana, and I ran upstairs without thinking, George screaming at me the whole time, for fear that the second floor was dangerous and may have broken windows or holes in the roof (now he panics), only to find Diana (obviously the brains in the family) curled like a small, shaking ball in our bathtub.

Back at the window, we stared mesmerized, frozen in fear, as the largest tree in our yard, an oak tree some fifty years old --- the same kind George has painted for years --- bent towards us. We watched the ground around its base as it heaved like some monster rising from the earth (an orc?). And in slow motion, the tree’s root system and a twenty-foot area of ground stretched towards the sky. The oak, as though lying down for a nap, moved towards the house ... and us.

It landed with an eerily silent crash (unheard over the roaring wind), its branches only a few feet from the kitchen window. As we stood unmoving and open-mouthed, Mother Nature, as though disappointed with our reaction, hurled an acorn into the window with a pop, sending Diana under the couch and the rest of us flying to the back of the room, jolted from our trance.

The next day, once the roads cleared enough to weave our car through the debris, downed trees, and power lines, George and I, both great admirers of lights and air conditioning, neither of which returned to our house for three weeks, drove to the nearest open airport (I think it was Baton Rouge) and flew to California.

Settled once again in la-la land (for Carmel really is like some form of Eden), George headed to the art supply store and returned to his easel that same night. Jet lag woke me extra early the following morning, around 4:00 a.m. I was not surprised to find George still in his studio, but the painting on his easel shocked me. (pictured, 36 inch diameter)

Gasp, “What are you doing? What is that?”

“It’s a hurricane. It’s Lili,” he replied with a laugh, followed by that rare and revered question,

“What do you think?”

“I’m flabbergasted. I don’t know what to think. Are you painting in oil?”

If you read my previous blog, Blue Dog: The Abstract Paintings, then you probably understand the extent of my shock. In recent years, George was painting tighter than ever. His paintings were controlled, specific, and orderly. They were like a woman without a hair out of place. All of a sudden, here was a rat’s nest. What’s more, George hadn’t painted in oil in years (see the blog Oil Paint or Acrylic?). The blending, loose brushstrokes, and raw emotion in this painting was like nothing I’d ever seen from him. (pictured, Hildegard, 24x24, my favorite of the Hurricanes, and hanging today in my space ....my office.... in Carmel)

The paint, it turns out, is a new form of water-based oil paint, an invention that greatly reduces the fumes (and danger) that accompany turpentine. He picked up these paints and a few round canvases the day before, never mentioning to me what he had in mind.

As I watched that morning, he began work on another canvas, this time a large rectangle. He painted freely, with no preconceived ideas of where he was going, nothing mapped out, and nothing designed. (pictured, Camille and Georges, each 36x63 inches, oil on canvas)

Far from the negative notions of destruction normally associated with these powerful storms*, these paintings are a tribute to nature’s awesome power. They are abstraction in its purest form.

Obsessed, George painted seventy Hurricanes in a row over the next six to eight months, most on round canvases, working quickly and rarely pausing between paintings. (Ironically, he did pause for five weeks late December 2002 to complete the highly organized painting Dependence, almost as though the Hurricanes had interrupted him before he could finish this defining piece). To reduce the indoor fumes, he nailed the paintings to the outside of our house, eventually using the ladder to stack them high, where they spent weeks drying in the sun (as we all know, ‘it never rains in California.’) (pictured, Frederic, 48 x48 and Haley, 46 inch diameter)

After seventy paintings, George moved on, ironically to his most controlled and complex series yet, with a return to the classic nude in Bodies (not yet detailed in a blog, but featured in part in the entry Jolie Blonde). Looking back on the Hurricanes, he describes the phenomenon today as something he ‘just had to get out of his system.’ We all know what that’s like, but most of us don’t have this lasting collection of evidence.

The series surprised not only me, but also our staff and George’s collectors. We had successful Hurricane exhibitions at both the New Orleans and Carmel galleries, but it wasn’t until the Rodrigue retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2008 that the paintings attracted significant attention from the general public. The museum’s director, John Bullard, created a circular room and painted it black. He swirled the round canvases in a snake-like pattern from floor to ceiling, so that these images of color, form, and energy surrounded the visitors.

I watched people enter that room with the same open mouths that I recalled from our oak tree experience during Hurricane Lili. For many viewers, it was their favorite room in the exhibition, despite the fact that most people had never seen these works before. I recall the young children especially who, unable to read the word “Hurricanes” on the wall, looked around wide-eyed and whispered, with awe and delight,

“The planets….”

For a better understanding of this room, view NOMA’s virtual tour here.

Some describe the Hurricanes as explosions, as though George’s other paintings of Landscapes and Blue Dogs burst into a million pieces on his canvas. Indeed in some works, one finds hints of oak trees and dogs integrated within the chaos.

This became more evident as he finished the series. He transitioned from the erratic Hurricanes to the controlled Bodies with a mixture of swirls and dogs, causing some to wonder if he had abandoned his hard edges and severe designs for good. (pictured, Genesis, 40x80 inches, 2 panels)

However, in summer 2003 he returned to the classical nude in Bodies, taking everyone by surprise once again.

Everyone but me, that is…..

With the Hurricanes, I learned my lesson, and I know that George is serious when he says, as he has many times over the years,

“I refuse to predict what I’m going to paint next.”

Wendy

*Note the dates of George’s Hurricanes, and their lack of connection to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. His reaction to that storm is unrelated and disparate to these canvases. It was many months before he created anything following Katrina (other than prints to raise money for area relief). When he did return to his easel, unlike the series described above, his paintings are dark and fragmented (to appear in some future blog). They reflect not a respect for nature, but rather confusion, anger, and depression --- those emotions that escaped no one in South Louisiana and surrounding areas, as we witnessed the widespread and seemingly endless suffering in our communities.

Blue Dog: The Abstract Paintings, 2001-2003

George Rodrigue completed the Xerox Collection in early 2001. He spent the next several months building his studio in Carmel, California, and by that summer we were settled in Carmel, remaining there most of the next two years.

Spurred on by the excitement over his new studio, he painted ‘round the clock, and I watched with interest as for the first time in several years (consider Absolut, Neiman Marcus, Jazz Fest, and Xerox), he approached his canvas without anyone’s expectations but his own. To my surprise, he shifted from the strong imagery of the Xerox paintings to the abstract.

I remember thinking that he must want to explode and break loose after these series of tight, controlled paintings; but instead his work became tighter and more controlled. He abandoned the background imagery and superficial meanings (i.e., “A Faster Breed,” “Family Business,” “PC Blues”) in favor of patterns and color exercises and abstract concepts. (pictured, Consequences and Round-a-bout, both 2002 acrylic on canvas 46 inch diameter)

Don’t get me wrong: the Xerox paintings were not concessions. They are typical of Rodrigue’s purposeful designs. As with the Cajun paintings, each element is locked in, unable to move without destroying the composition. And yet, George longed for something explicit, something that practically screamed what was going on in his head. In his mind the Blue Dog, although rooted in the loup-garou and Tiffany (as described in the blogs Blue Dog: In the Beginning and Blue Dog: The Ghost of Tiffany) is not a dog at all, but rather a strong and interesting shape --- a shape that, unlike a circle or square, he invented. In the paintings following Xerox, George embraced this shape like never before. (pictured, Everywhere 2003 acrylic on canvas 30x30 inches)

The first painting in this new series (Puzzle of Life, 2001, 46 inch diameter, pictured on his easel below, as it looked the morning he finished it) is an obvious artistic puzzle. George has said all along that his paintings are puzzles, and that once he finds the solution, the painting is finished. But for the rest of us, as we look at his canvases of Cajun dinners and musicians or of Blue Dogs among the oaks and tombs and other elements, it’s hard to see past the subject matter. The complexity eludes the average viewer.

In this new direction, the canvas shape becomes important, and the patterns within the painting play off the edges of this round format. But don’t think for one second that George loses his sense of humor or his playfulness in these contemplative designs. His concepts are clever, witty, and unpredictable. (pictured, Wheel of Fortune, Roulette, and ‘Round the Mulberry Bush, each fitted with a motor and a remote control, so that the paintings rotate with the push of a button).

And don’t think he lost his roots and abandoned Louisiana or the Cajuns or the loup-garou. It’s just that the path is a bit ambiguous, even deceiving. It always has been in George’s art, and that is a major point in these works. Things are not what they seem. He may not see the dog shape as that animal we know as a dog, but he never saw the oak tree as a trunk and branches either. In his head, beyond the symbolism and nostalgia, it is all about creating something interesting to the eye. (pictured, Evermore, 24x24 inches, with 4 inch sides)

What’s more, it’s not only shapes that define the puzzle, but also color and how it relates to other hues within the painting. (pictured, View of Hues, 2002, 36x84 inches; I Look Different Close Up, 2002, 60x40 inches)

George’s most significant piece during this period, and indeed a defining work in his career (to my mind, the equivalent of the Aioli Dinner, but in the Blue Dog Series) is Dependence (2002-2003, 60x60 inches, formed by four canvases, each 30x30 inches)

Each of the four panels is dependent on the others to create the whole, and yet alone they hold interesting shapes, woven together in patterned shades of blue. The distinct but related colors lie within the same hard edges George retained from art school ----the same ones that define his oak trees. He worked on this piece for weeks, often inverting the panels or altering entire areas of patterns. In this painting, George is screaming at us. It is as if he says,

“Haven’t you seen all along that I’m an abstract artist?”

….an abstract artist, that is, who happens to paint something we recognize.

Interestingly enough, I was not far off when I predicted an explosion for George following the Xerox paintings. He just hadn’t reached that point yet, and he had to become even tighter and more controlled before he could let loose.

But it does happen.... all of a sudden, in one great burst overnight, and the resulting Hurricanes, a series of seventy frenzied, wholly abstract canvases, pushes ashore and onto his easel in a shocking change of direction.

Wendy

Blue Dog 2000, The Year of Xerox

Although most collectors and fans know by now that George Rodrigue avoids mass-production, products, and other projects that might be described as ‘sell-out,’ there was a period of time when I (and I daresay much of the gallery staff) approached each day on the defensive.

The late 1990s brought a flood of projects his way, and to many on the outside it looked like George was grabbing at everything --- Neiman Marcus, the Chicago Cow Parade, books like Blue Dog Man, Blue Dog Christmas, and Blue Dog Love, posters for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the inaugural poster for President Bill Clinton, and numerous smaller projects for non-profits such as the Red River Revel in Shreveport and the Shaeffer Eye Center/Beam’s Crawfish Boil in Birmingham. (for more info see the blog Blue Dog Man, 1996-1999).

However, behind the scenes, although we were very busy, it just didn’t feel like a sell-out. Every project was unique and chosen for some purpose other than money. In fact, in looking at the list above, not one thing even brought in much money --- not directly anyway. Rather they were all interesting projects, things to be worked out, that excited George both artistically and, there is no denying, promotionally. Each one of these helped increase his fame in certain arenas on a positive level, while at the same time challenged his creativity.

And yet, I was shocked at the number of projects he turned down. People often asked him, “How did you get the Blue Dog paintings on the show Friends?” or “How did you get to paint Bill Clinton for his inauguration?” It was clear that most people thought we sought out these projects (or even paid for them!) when in fact, they poured in. Many nights we sat on the couch going through that week's stack of offers. And ninety percent of the time, before I barely outlined the proposal, his answer was “no.”

He turned down (and continues to turn down) everything from cartoons to major motion pictures to stuffed animals to needlepoint to clothing lines to mascots for major league football teams and women’s roller derby to the more obvious ---- t-shirts and magnets and baseball caps and posters.

I’m amazed at the number of licensing companies that still contact him, thinking that because they’re not out there, surely he never thought of making t-shirts or posters.

To George’s mind, while he’s here on this earth, alive and painting, any of those projects might ruin his art. That’s not to say that there won’t be posters on every street corner one day, but it will be long after he’s gone, after his art reaches that elevated status that comes with a complete oeuvre and a lifetime’s achievement, so that the gap between the original paintings (and silkscreens) and the ‘products’ is so wide as to be insignificant.

There was one project, however, that appealed to George not only creatively and promotionally, but also financially: Xerox.

When we received their letter sometime early in 1999, although he was intrigued, George initially turned them down. He had hesitated in favor of the project only because the letter came not from Xerox, but from Young and Rubicam, the legendary New York advertising agency. His years at the Art Center College of Design in the 1960s focused heavily on advertising design, and in fact as a student George considered this as his profession (for more background see the blog: Art School: Lafayette and Los Angeles, 1962-1967).

Unsatisfied with his reply, the Y&R team, specifically Barry Hoffman and Bob Wyatt, visited us at our then-home in Lafayette, Louisiana. They had with them designs for a world wide advertising campaign for their client Xerox. Each design featured the Blue Dog. I could see George was torn. On the one hand, he was like a child with excitement at the thought of working with these talented designers, and he was dreaming about what he would do with the generous payment they offered for the use of his art in their campaign; and on the other hand, he winced at their initial work. In all cases, they had removed the dog from his paintings, so that it stood on its own or appeared as a design-element in their lay-outs. In at least one example, the dog had a speech bubble attached to its mouth.

If there is one hard and fast rule for George regarding whether or not to allow the use of his artwork in any project, it is this:

The Blue Dog exists only within a complete painting of George’s design.

He turned them down again.

Within a week, they flew us to New York and tried again. I’ll never forget that meeting, because I knew then that it was going to happen, and admittedly, the thought of that big pile of money, the likes of which we’d never seen, was like winning the lottery. Y&R agreed to George’s terms regarding his art. They would give him tag words, and he in turn would design the complete painting and ad, so that the campaign was more about his art as a whole than the Blue Dog (or, frankly, Xerox). (pictured below, paintings based on the tag phrases "A Faster Breed," "Taking Care of Business," "Family Business," "A Smarter Breed," and "Service Business")

This included not only print ads and billboards for the United States and Europe, but also television commercials filmed in a museum setting with George’s paintings as the focal point. That meeting’s icing on the cake was a last minute arrival. Aldo Papone, the legendary advertising genius who coined the phrase for American Express, “Don’t leave home without it,” popped in because he wanted to meet George in person. You would have thought George had met Elvis himself.

The Xerox campaign gave George the opportunity to work with America’s advertising giants. He became friends with these men and looked forward each day to exchanging ideas and sharing his work. He painted on the Xerox campaign throughout the year 2000, working on little else. Rarely have I seen him so excited about a project.

So was this a sell-out? I don’t know. I do know that it was not a mistake. Whatever flak he took over the campaign was mostly in Louisiana --- a product of that usual hometown attitude that comes with anything successful in one’s own backyard. The national press was, well, impressed. And indeed, I’m not sure that the nine-month world-wide promotion didn’t do more to promote George’s art than it did Xerox. The naysayers made the obvious analogy that George paints the Blue Dog as though he’s running it off on a copy machine.

But those of us close to it never saw it that way, especially given the complexity of these works. Also, remember, this was one man sitting in his studio at 3:00 A.M., Hank Williams turned down low, a glass of milk beside him, completely lost in his thoughts, his designs, his paints. For a project that came from The Big City and from The Big Time, in the end it was just George sitting in Lafayette, Louisiana at his easel. High art or low art? You decide.

And so what about the money? He got a big hunk of it, and we were beside ourselves with excitement. To the dismay of our accountant, there was no way it was going into savings. We decided to take the whole chunk and do something we could never do before --- buy a house in Carmel, California. And so that’s what we did. We found a property on eighteen acres in the country, in Carmel Valley. Even better, there was enough space for George to build his dream studio. It was the first (and only) studio he ever built, always before taking over back bedrooms or offices or a TV room. Let’s face it, he deserved it. Even though we now live most of the year in New Orleans, it is in Carmel that he does most of his painting today. (For photos, see the blog Not Painting in Carmel). I guess you could say that it’s our Xerox house and, no question, sell-out or not, it was worth it.

Wendy

*all images in this blog entry are acrylic on canvas, size 48x36 inches, painted for the Xerox campaign in 2000

**for a history of the Blue Dog Series visit Blue Dog: In the Beginning, 1984-1989

Jolie Blonde

According to local legend, in the 1920s a Cajun imprisoned in Port Arthur, Texas pined for his lost love, his beautiful blonde, his “Jolie Blonde,” and wrote a waltz from those feelings of longing. Over the years the song became for many the Cajun anthem based on a sort of modern day Evangeline, and Cajun men throughout Louisiana sang in French some version of...

Pretty blonde, look at what you’ve done

You left me to go

To go with another than me

What hope and what future can I have?

On the internet there are other more credible versions of the history of this song, most notably its copyright origins with Cleoma Breaux (1906-1941), famous as an early performer with her husband Joe Falcon, and I encourage you to explore this history if you want facts over romance. However, I will touch on that story a bit by sharing that Cleoma was from a town of 15,000 people near Lafayette called Crowley, Louisiana (Rice Capitol of the World), a place famous not only for its charm, but also for growing some true Louisiana characters like brothers Edwin and Marion Edwards, Senator John Breaux, Judge Edmond Reggie (father-n-law to Ted Kennedy), and our long-time friend Billy Broadhurst. For some reason this small town with its motto “Where Life is Rice and Easy,” as well as its annual rice festival and its newly renovated opera house is an on-going source of Louisiana’s colorful history, right down to the most famous of Cajun songs.

Ironically George Rodrigue, although unfamiliar with her connection to “Jolie Blonde,” did paint Cleoma Breaux and Joe Falcon in 1977. He recalled her as famous for accompanying her husband on a modern cowboy guitar, an unusual instrument for an early Cajun band. The Breauxs played for years at Oneziphore Guidry’s dance hall in Rayne, Louisiana (Frog Capitol of the World), and Joe Falcon (1900 – 1965) recorded “Allons a Lafayette” in 1928, making him the first Cajun music recording star. (pictured, Cajun music legend Doug Kershaw, Jolie's Louisiana Bistro owner Steve Santillo, George Rodrigue)

But for the purposes of this blog and the story of Rodrigue’s Jolie Blonde paintings, what matters is the story George clung to as a young man (and indeed still does today); what matters is the romantic myth of this convict who wrote a waltz for the woman he loved, a faceless Cajun beauty waiting for Rodrigue to invent her image.

By 1974 George Rodrigue lived in Lafayette, Louisiana and painted Cajuns. It had been three years since his first painting with people, The Aioli Dinner, and his collectors expected complex works with large groups of people, rooted in old photographs and Cajun history. To paint these intricate and tight designs, he remained tense for hours, even days, steadying his hand with a mahlstick, a Knights of Columbus sword he pulled like Excalibur on a hot summer day from the mud of the Bayou Teche.

It was 3:00 AM one night, and he had painted nearly twenty hours to complete one of these complicated works for a client. His right hand ached, and his head swirled with thoughts of tiny faces and deliberate brushstrokes. He returned to his easel and in one hour, as he listened to Joel Sonnier and Doug Kershaw sing his favorites, without model, photograph, or mahlstick, he painted Jolie Blonde. She came out of his head and onto the canvas, quickly and with loose brushstrokes, painted entirely for himself, without a collector standing by. (1974, size 24x18)

Ironically, the painting sold the next day, with four couples fighting over the purchase.

Rodrigue’s Jolie Blonde paintings, like his Evangelines, could fill an entire museum exhibition. He photographed dozens of models over the years and painted hundreds of versions.

However, it is that first version, the one he invented from his dreams in 1974, that remains not only his most famous, but also the quintessential Cajun portrait of that culture's ‘beautiful blonde.’

Jolie Blonde is as much a repetitive subject for George as the Oak Tree and the Blue Dog. In fact, for many years he’s painted the three subjects together. (pictured, Another Dangerous Woman Crept Into My Life, 1991, 40x30; Sweet Dreams, 1991, 36x48)

I’ve modeled as Jolie Blonde for numerous works for George over the years, beginning in 1994. (pictured, Chanel #5, 1995, 78x78; She Never Saw Me, 2003, 24x20)

His recent series Bodies re-visits Jolie Blonde as a classic nude in both cemetery settings and more contemporary arrangements. My feelings towards these works hang somewhat on a cliff. On the one hand, I’m honored to fit George’s needs for his on-going interest in this Cajun protagonist. (pictured, Leg Over Chair, Day 2004; Sitting Blue, 2004)

And on the other hand, I am alarmed at his ability to mix her story with my vulnerability. This is where it’s important to remember that these are not portraits (particularly for you, the viewer), but rather means to an artistic end (see the blog Portraits for more insight). Just like George, I can't help but view these paintings with an eye like no one else. In a strange way, I see them as though they are George himself --- or rather, paintings of his feelings, of his soul --- and so it doesn’t embarrass me to see them on the walls of the gallery or a museum or even our home. (In fact one day when I’m eighty, I'm sure I'll be quite proud and nostalgic, and I expect I'll sit in a rocker in some museum exhibition surrounded by Bodies, signing autographs-)

There is only one Jolie Blonde, a painting from Bodies, that makes me uncomfortable and that I see as me, but I’ve become personal enough already in this blog, and so that mystery must remain for you, the reader, just that ….a mystery. And frankly, when it comes to the art, my thoughts on this matter have no relevance anyway. (pictured, and this is not it, Heart Trouble, 2005)

In addition to Bodies and other Jolie Blonde With Blue Dog paintings, George honors the legend with Jolie’s Louisiana Bistro, a restaurant he opened with his sons André and Jacques and friend Steve Santillo in Lafayette, Louisiana last year.

The restaurant features upscale New Orleans cuisine, as well as a large collection of Rodrigue’s Cajun paintings. It’s logo, as you may expect, is that first Jolie Blonde from 1974, a painting he created completely from his head in one hour in the middle of the night. That is his Jolie Blonde, the one he loves the best. The rest, no matter whom the models, are just attempts at recapturing that spontaneous, mysterious, and enchanting original. (pictured, Together Again, 2004)

Or are they? He might argue that he’s moved on, and that the Jolie Blonde of thirty-five years ago has been replaced, both in his life and on his canvas. As much as I love the early painting, I like to think that this is true. For an artist so associated with repetitive imagery, when it comes to the classics, to the artwork that defines his career, he never repeats himself. He moves forward, always looking towards that next great masterpiece.

Wendy

The Art Business, A Few Thoughts

Written in response to questions about the art business from artists and their partners, especially Joey, who wrote in this week-

When I think back twenty years on the early days of working in the galleries in New Orleans and Carmel, California, I remember the frustration of wanting to do things a certain way but not being able to because I was employed by George’s agent, and it was not my business. In those pre-computer times, I hand-wrote notes to clients on a daily basis and made weekly runs to Carmel Camera Center for photographs. Sandra (my co-worker) and I used to clip the new silkscreens onto a suction cup on the front door, waiting for the right light to take a photograph, because professional photos from Louisiana could take four to six weeks to process. In photos of original paintings, anyone who looked closely enough would see the base of the front door, as well as the sidewalk in the background.

A client called with questions, and in the time it took for us to take photographs, write letters, and process the mail, it could be five or six days before they received available images. And by that time, especially in the case of originals, paintings sold, and then we faced apologies and excuses. It was a hands-on business, not a mail order one. Because George never has wholesaled his work nor sold to other galleries, people dealt directly (as they do today) with the Carmel or New Orleans gallery to make a purchase. For several years I was one of five people in the world that might help someone purchase a Rodrigue. I think this process humanized not only us, but also George, and it’s the reason why, in these current days of Pay Pal and on-line shopping carts that we avoid selling on line. We’re old-fashioned, and we enjoy and value that personal contact with our clients, something lost with today’s ‘point and click.’

It’s interesting to me that many evenings when I scroll through that day’s QuickBook receipts (a process quite different from the hand-written records of yesteryear, or rather, three years ago…), I recognize names from the old days, people I sold to in New Orleans or Carmel between 1991 and 1996, the years I worked day-to-day in the galleries. I remember almost all of these clients! ---A fact I attribute to those hand-written notes and regular personal correspondence, so different from today’s mass e-mailers. (George points out to me that it was not only a lot of legwork, but also luck --- how the ball bounces. Pictured painting is unfinished.)

Recent purchases by those clients tell me that George’s art stands the test of time. Just last month a doctor purchased a large painting from the Carmel gallery, and I recognized his name.

He was a medical student from the Midwest who came into the Carmel gallery in 1991 and fell in love with a large canvas (size 48x36), the same size as his recent purchase, but priced at that time at $7500. We had a great conversation, full of a genuine passion for the art on my part (not yet the artist, HA!), and a genuine curiosity by this young man who recognized a brilliant painting and was desperate to have it. He convinced me, and I took a chance on him. He mailed me a check each month for $100 as he worked his way through school, and with each receipt I included a note about George’s latest projects. Several years later, once finished with his residency, he sent the small balance and took possession of his painting. Since that time he’s purchased two additional canvases at ten times his original purchase price.

There are many stories like this in the Rodrigue Galleries. As the years pass, people don’t tire of it, but rather crave more of it. And the personal connection with Sandra or Mary in Carmel or Lawrence or Rhonda in New Orleans or Dickie in Lafayette is an important part of that process. If we lose that, then we might as well close the galleries and ship everything to E-bay or QVC. We might as well quit caring, trusting, believing. (pictured, Mary, Sandra, Lawrence, and Rhonda)

Trusting is probably the biggest obstacle in a business like this. I’ve seen George burned many times over the years. Galleries, business partners, agents, and even friends have stolen from him, and if the betrayals weren’t so painful (sad) I’d give a few examples here (although I do recount one incident below).

But George taught me something valuable:

1) Let it go and move on. Harboring grudges or hatred or thoughts of revenge are useless and, more important, exhausting. Those feelings hold you back and make you bitter and unproductive. It’s far better to take the loss, learn from the situation, and do your best to avoid a repeat down the road.

2)That said, you can’t stop believing in people! You have to take a chance! I often am shocked with the trust I see George place in others, just on the heels of a theft or betrayal. And yet, he trusted me. He trusts his sons. He trusts our small gallery staff. He trusts the carpenters and painters at the new gallery. He trusts everyone he deals with. As a result, sure, sometimes bad things happen. But also as a result, wonderful things happen. Most people can be trusted, and in my experience, it’s worth taking a chance.

At the same time, it never pays to be stupid. If you are an artist who places your work with a gallery, you have no choice but to trust that agent or that director. Do your research first. And always, no matter how much you hate to do it, drop by unexpectedly and count your paintings and check on those sales. (pictured, Rodrigue warehouse)

I say this because of personal experience, most of which I can’t repeat here. However here’s one example:

In the late 1980s George had an exhibition of one hundred Blue Dog and Cajun works in California. The show was a sell-out. The gallery owners closed up shop and skipped town. George never found them and never was paid. Two year’s work was lost. (However, he did receive bills from their framer and caterer; bills he ended up paying to avoid a lawsuit).

But I still say (as would he): TRUST, but BE CAREFUL, and yet I’ll repeat, TRUST. George is the first to admit that the best things in life have come his way because he took a chance on people.

And sometimes that faith lies in just encouraging the artist's passion, the profession. George has always believed in supporting other artists, particularly local ones. (pictured, Jacques Rodrigue with artist Bill Hemmerling)

If you're personal in your approach, you're miles ahead of the rest. (pictured, the gallery of artist Ran Horn, who paints Van Gogh (in his own outrageous way) in Van Horn, Texas)

There is no manual (or none that I’ve tackled without being bored to tears) for the gallery business. When hiring people, you might be surprised to know that for me, art experience is not a reason for employment. However, retail, or any other sort of experience in working with the public, is Number One. If you’re too shy to start a conversation with a total stranger, than you shouldn’t be working in a gallery. If you’re too snobby to treat the person in shorts and a t-shirt with as much respect as the one in the Armani suit, than you’re not for us. (pictured, typical Rodrigue collectors at Mardi Gras)

After that, an art history degree is great, but just as important is a passion for this particular artist, in our case George Rodrigue. Without a manual, we have to teach it all to you anyway, so the best thing you can start with is a love of the art. (pictured, Rodrigue collector Don Sanders in his Houston office, with Jacques Rodrigue)

We have very little turnover among our staff, because we treat them well, not only in terms of salaries, but also time off, anything they need regarding their families or to take care of health issues or (following Katrina) housing issues. We trust them and respect them, and in turn they treat our business with the same care they might treat it if it were their own. (pictured, in the French Quarter Gallery, September 2005, between Hurricanes Katrina and Rita)

We can leave town for months and know that our staff is taking care of things in a way that makes us proud. And on that rare occasion that we hire someone new, George and I panic about the integration with the others. Will that person who’s been with us fifteen years be happy with this addition?

Furthermore, when it comes to our staff versus the public, we back our staff every time. This is different than the ‘customer is always right’ mantra from most retail establishments. We know our staff that well, and we’ll back them in any client disagreement or that rare complaint, knowing that the worst case scenario is a simple misunderstanding or an honest mistake, something never worthy of reprimand because, let’s face it, it happens to all of us.

And finally, when it comes to the business of art, I recommend fastidiousness. Don’t jump on some idea on a whim. And unless you really need it, don’t jump on it for the money either. Let the art (and the artist!) guide the way. The times I’ve seen George least happy is when he followed the whims of others, when someone pressured him into something. If he’s doing something for the money, the money has to be so great, and the need so important, that any artistic compromise is worth it. In that same vein, if he’s doing it for an alternate cause, like a non-profit, or a hometown honor, it had better be worth it and strong enough to endure public criticism and in some cases disdain and/or jealousy.

There’s a reason there are no Blue Dog t-shirts floating around out there. There’s a reason Blue Dog posters don’t pop up in every corner shop and Blue Dog galleries in every shopping mall. And yet there’s also a reason that George agreed to 17,000 New Orleans Jazz Fest posters in 1995, 1996, and 2000 (and believe me, as any Jazz Fest poster artist will tell you, it wasn’t the money).

So if you’re an artist or an artist’s partner, and you want to make it in the business world while retaining the romanticism and bohemianism of the art world, I don’t have sound advice nor a rulebook, but I do know what’s worked for George:

Trust your fellow human beings. Take a chance on people.

But be smart and follow up with thorough but non-threatening checks on your art and business.

When it comes to projects, remember your long-term goals and follow your instincts.

Become comfortable and open (even slightly vulnerable) with the public, and surround yourself with people who are the same. If you’re genuine, most people will respond favorably. But if you fake it, they will know.

And if you are the artist, PAINT, CREATE. George tells artists all of the time: “You aren’t painting enough.”

It’s almost religious, isn’t it? Trust, believe, and tackle the disappointments as lessons, even gifts, that they may grant you the courage to continue and the empathy to understand your critics while strengthening your resolve.

As I read this to George he reminded me that the art business, or any business if it’s your life’s calling, above all else, should be fun! (pictured George Rodrigue with Paul Prudhomme and Pete Fountain)

Wendy

For more on The Art Business, see the post Two Publishing Stories.

Blue Dog Man, 1996- 1999

Maybe it’s Diana Krall singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” or maybe it’s the lights on our turquoise tree, or maybe it’s this stormy New Orleans afternoon, but something has made me sentimental in thinking back on what I like to call the ‘Blue Dog Man’ years, 1996-1999. It was during this time that George and I got married; we became full owners of the Rodrigue galleries; we began a prodigious relationship with Neiman Marcus; we toured with great success for the publisher Stewart, Tabori & Chang; and we took on so many projects not mentioned that I’ll be lucky if I get through the highlights here.

As you may recall from the blog Blue Dog: Out of Control, the mid-1990s saw George Rodrigue painting around the clock, trying to please his fans, his agent, and his bill collectors. Somewhere along the way he decided it wasn’t fun anymore, and by 1996 he was shutting down. As tensions mounted with his agent, George became rebellious. He took the Blue Dog in new directions, hoping to spark some fun in his routine.

This included paintings and silkscreens of the Blue Dog in a bear suit, as well as its occasional transformation as Dudley, the Bull Dog. As usually happens with George and new ideas, many of those closest to him, namely his agent and friends, worried that he was messing with a good thing. But remember, as I’ve discussed in numerous blogs both directly and indirectly, in order for George to be happy as an artist, his art must be exciting to him. It can’t be dictated by the whims of others, or else very quickly he becomes bored, and he risks turning his passion into ...well… work. (pictured, Dog in a Bear Suit 1997, original silkscreen edition of 75)

This is past our time period and a bit off subject, but I do find it ironic that in recent years George’s son Jacques has become “Bear Head.”

The highlight of 1996, without question, was Neiman Marcus’s commission. They asked George to create an image for the cover of their men’s catalogue, The Book, with the only requirement that he include their symbol, a butterfly, in the design. (pictured, Butterflies Are Free, 36x63 inches, acrylic on canvas).

Although painting an original work, George was aware that the image ultimately would wrap around a book. He thought that something should happen as one turned the book over. In this case, a butterfly leaves the rug and flies alongside the Blue Dog. On the front cover we see a Blue Dog dressed as a man. The blank space above the dog’s head held the catalogue’s title.

The image was a tremendous success, and as a result George’s collaboration with Neiman Marcus continued with Hawaiian Blues (1998, 36x63, acrylic on canvas), also a catalogue cover, but this time celebrating the opening of their new store in Honolulu.

The butterflies amass on the back of the book (the left), travel across the spine, and form a lei around the dog’s neck. Here it’s easy to relate to George’s Cajun paintings if one thinks of the dog as being cut out and pasted onto the landscape of an old Hawaiian postcard just as the Cajuns were cut out and pasted onto Louisiana (see the blog The Aioli Dinner and a Cajun Artist).

I watched George work on this piece for months, and I remember clearly his enjoying the puzzle of creating this composition and concept (similar to the recent painting Victory on Bayou St. John). He formed the sketch on a duplicate canvas, also size 36x63, and he pasted the butterflies onto the design. We kept George’s mother, in her 90s and living with us at the time, happily occupied and feeling needed for weeks by having her cut out butterflies from enlarged photocopies of clip art images. George stretched an identical canvas and copied his design in paint while referring to the mock-up across the room.

Normally George does not make prints of his paintings. (The prints are original silkscreens, different from the paintings, and I do promise to attack that blog down the road). But in this case, as with the other Neiman Marcus prints, George made silkscreens of the painting and sold them in both his galleries and within the corresponding catalogue. The one thousand Hawaiian Blues prints sold out within just a few weeks, and to this day the painting is arguably George’s most famous from the Blue Dog Series.

Following the success of Hawaiian Blues, Neiman Marcus commissioned The Millennium (1999, 36x63, acrylic on canvas), George’s design for their January 2000 catalogue cover. As with the other paintings, they gave him carte blanche with regards to design and concept, provided he incorporate a butterfly in some way.

An Egyptian plucks a star from the cosmos, symbolizing the beginning of creativity and art. This pushes through and survives the Dark Ages in the form of a Viking ship. At the same time, creativity and art begin in Louisiana as a mass of butterflies. They move across the spine of the book, and the two concepts collide on the cover in the form of a Blue Dog, a powerful symbol of creativity and art in the year 2,000 and beyond.

Following The Millennium, George dissolved his relationship with Neiman Marcus, lest his Blue Dog become their symbol; however, the partnership was a positive one on every level, and the department store’s willingness to give him complete freedom in his designs allowed George the opportunity to re-examine meaning within his art.

Simultaneously, he completed the book Blue Dog Man (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1999). Unlike the fictional account in the book Blue Dog (1994, see the blog Two Publishing Stories…), in Blue Dog Man George enjoyed the freedom that comes with having proven oneself. He tells his story of the Blue Dog Series for the first time, tying it in with his Cajun paintings and daring to admit that he himself had become the Blue Dog ------- that is, the Blue Dog Man.

By this time, people stopped him on the street and asked him about his paintings. He became a celebrity as ‘the artist who paints the Blue Dog.’ It might appear he gave in to this label, but I think rather he embraced it and saw it as a new direction, maybe even something empowering that allowed him to move forward in his art. Otherwise, why would he have surprised me with the image below as our wedding portrait (1997, 24x36)? He wasn’t laughing when he gave it to me. He was serious and I don’t think it would have occurred to him to paint us together in any other way.

There were other exciting projects during these years as well, including the 1996 poster for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival featuring George’s good friend Pete Fountain;

A commission by the Democratic National Committee to paint President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore for the official poster commemorating the 53^rd Presidential Inaugural (1997, a detailed blog on this to come later);

Luck Be a Lady (1999), a 15-foot painting celebrating the opening of Harrah’s Casino in New Orleans (hanging there today within the Besh Steakhouse);

And the Chicago Cow Parade (1999), for which Neiman Marcus requested three Rodrigue cows to graze in their flower gardens on Michigan Avenue. The project unfortunately caused a copyright nightmare and lawsuit when the Cow Parade attorneys reproduced miniature versions of George’s cows for Hallmark stores across the country after he specifically denied them permission. Upon settling the dispute, we ended up with several thousand of these cows in our warehouse, and in typical Rodrigue-form, he turned them into an installation for the New Orleans Museum of Art exhibition in 2008 (pictured, one of the Chicago Cows in front of A Herd of Moos, a Wall of Blues, created from illegally reproduced mini-cows).

George donated two of the cows for auction benefiting the American Cancer Society, and the third tours assorted venues today, currently posing for pictures in the lobby of the New Orleans Sheraton Hotel.

So what does it mean to be the Blue Dog Man? The concept appealed to George, as evidenced not only by our wedding invitation, but also by exhibitions like “Blue Dog For President,” on view in 1996 in Union Station, Washington, D.C. (pictured, As Honest as the Day is Long, I Once Debated Nixon, and Secret Service Dog, all 1996)

This Blue Dog Man direction propelled George forward in his thinking. By January 1998 he was free of his agent and open to his own whims, without dictation or pressure from anyone. During this period of the late 1990s, he and the Blue Dog became one and the same, on a journey together, and George recognized liberation. After twenty-five years of painting and commenting on the past with the Cajuns, he dared to use the Blue Dog to comment on today. He expressed opinions in his work, as well as satire and predictions and whimsy (and if you still have any doubt, see the painting No More Dukes in the blog about Louisiana characters). Basically, any idea he had as a man, he could translate through the Blue Dog onto the canvas.

As I feared at the start of this story, there is just too much to cover in these years. I didn’t even get to the museum exhibitions such as the Gwinnett County Arts Museum in Atlanta, the excitement of 50-city national book tours such as the one for Blue Dog Man, or festival posters and fundraisers such as The Schaeffer Eye Center/Beam’s Crawfish Boil in Birmingham, the Shreveport Red River Revel, and the 50^th Anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz Club. The Revel especially is important, not only because it supports youth art programs throughout North Louisiana (directly in line with the newly founded George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts), but also because it’s the first place we tried our public presentations, where George paints in front of an audience as I narrate his story, something we’ve done countless times since for schools, museums, and on book tour.

These festivals and tours were the beginning of our ‘partnership,’ if you will, something other than husband and wife, friendship, or business, but rather a precursor to Musings of an Artist’s Wife.

My mother used to say (and my sister will attest) that I never have had trouble talking. As I’ve gotten older, I try to be a better listener than speaker, but when it comes to George, sentiment gets the better of me, and I easily fill whatever time I’m allotted, whether twenty minutes or three hours, with stories about this interesting person, this Blue Dog Man. People ask me, aren’t you nervous? How are you so prepared? And I respond every time with the same honest (albeit sappy) answer:

“It is easy to speak about someone you love.”

Wendy

For a complete history of the Blue Dog leading up to this post, see (1) Blue Dog: In the Beginning, 1984-1989, (2) Blue Dog: The Ghost of Tiffany, 1990-1992, (3) Blue Dog: Out of Control, 1993-1995,

..... and following this post, see (5)Blue Dog 2000, The Year of Xerox, (6) Blue Dog: The Abstract Paintings, 2001-2003

Portraits: The Kingfish and Uncle Earl

For years George tried to convince me that he is not a portrait painter. He explained that others paint with far more skill in interpreting likenesses, and that he used his models as just that, models. If he paints Jolie Blonde, in other words, it’s not about the person posing, but rather about the legend. When he painted his mother’s school class, it was not about her and her friends, but rather a depiction of a slice of time.

This despite the Aioli Dinner (1971) and its table of actual New Iberia Frenchmen, although interestingly enough George only in recent years referred to those faces as portraits, even after his laborious struggle to capture their likenesses (see The Aioli Dinner and a Cajun Artist). The milieu was more important than any individual part.

Even the paintings of his sons he described in terms of what the figures represented, as opposed to the personalities or portrayals of the boys he knows as André and Jacques (see the blog The Rodrigue Brothers). The paintings revealed little about them (his sons) because George designed the works to enlighten his viewers about something else (the Cajuns).

He refused to call himself a portrait artist even after painting three United States Presidents, five Louisiana Governors, three great jazz musicians for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (actually four, if we count the non-Jazz Fest poster of Mahalia Jackson, but that will be another blog), countless paintings of well-known people such as Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Chef Paul Prudhomme, Quarterback Drew Brees, Cajun and Zydeco musicians Clifton Chenier, the Romero Brothers, the Rayne-bo Ramblers, and well, you get the idea.

So when he said, “I’m not a portrait painter,” what was that? Was this some form of modesty? Or dare I say insecurity?

Neither are terms ever associated with George when it comes to his art. I think he firmly believed for years that his portraits just didn’t measure up. And because his goal was to capture the essence of a culture as opposed to a person, he perhaps dismissed his portraits, because for his purposes their individual effectiveness really didn’t matter.

Maybe on a smaller level the denial was rooted in resentment, stemming from what he saw as an albatross of family portrait commissions in the 1980s or even that first self-portrait of 1971 (see the blog Early Oak Trees and a Regrettable Self-Portrait).

To the rest of us, there’s no denying that George has painted portraits for nearly forty years. Yet he himself only admitted it recently. It was spring 2008, and the New Orleans Museum of Art opened its exhibition Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Forty Years of Cajuns, Blue Dogs and Beyond Katrina, showcasing two hundred and sixty Rodrigue paintings and sculpture in their main galleries. The museum’s director John Bullard chose the categories, and the one he insisted upon most was “Portraits.”

Once installed, “Portraits” comprised the largest section of the exhibition. There were more portraits than Oak Trees, Cajuns, Blue Dogs, Hurricanes, or Bodies, the show’s other categories. It never occurred to Bullard to group the Portraits with the Cajuns. And yet it never occurred to George not to do so.

George and I walked into the show and there was the word “Portraits,” stenciled in large letters on the wall. Without counting, I’m sure there were fifty or more paintings in that room, and yet George viewed them as though for the first time.

After walking the large area in silence, he paused in front of a painting at the far corner and said, “This was my first real portrait, maybe the best one I’ve ever done.” It was the first time I heard him refer to himself as having painted an effective portrait, or for that matter, a portrait at all.

Painted in 1980 The Kingfish (oil on canvas, 60x36 inches) is George’s interpretation of Louisiana Governor and U.S. Senator Huey Long (1893-1935). As with his other Cajun paintings, he painted Long not in shadow as one would expect beneath a tree, but rather glowing with his culture as though cut out and pasted onto the dark trunk. His white clothing and barely discernible feet cause him to float within the composition, as though he is a ghost, timeless and historic.

The setting is Huey’s famous campaign speech. He stands beneath the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville and says,

“Just as Evangeline cried for her Gabriel, Louisiana is crying for roads and schools and bridges.”

George uses the tree to frame not only Huey, but also a vision of the capitol building he would construct in 1932 in Baton Rouge. In addition, the apparition refers to Long’s assassination, occurring three years later in that very structure.

Soon after its completion the painting hung on exhibition in the Senate Rotunda in Washington, D.C. during a show of Louisiana artists. (pictured, George with Mrs. Long and former U.S. Senator Russell Long, son of Huey Long, from a newspaper article covering the show).

Again, when George painted The Kingfish he did not think of it as a portrait, but rather as an extension of his efforts to preserve his culture and record Louisiana history. It wasn’t until that day at NOMA, when he looked around the room and saw what he’d done that he dared to discuss his works as portraits.

After painting Huey Long it was natural that George follow with his brother, which is exactly what he did in 1989. Uncle Earl (oil on canvas, 60x36 inches) depicts Louisiana Governor Earl K. Long (1895-1960).

As with Huey, George paints Earl on the campaign trail, this time in North Louisiana where he drove door to door in his white Cadillac (like driving around in one’s living room, I’ve often thought), purchasing vegetables from farmers in one parish and distributing the food to working people in the next. He too is framed by the oak tree, but instead of the capitol building, George painted pea patches, shown in three rows to Earl's left. At the NOMA show I got a real kick out of hearing George talk about this painting:

“There he is, Crazy Earl, screaming into the microphone.”

I also noticed during the NOMA exhibition that whereas Huey is George’s favorite, Earl belongs to the people. They love this painting, and among the public it is considered one of his best.

Note: These blogs are not meant to be history lessons. They’re about the paintings and the artist behind them. For a great read on Huey Long, thanks to Hollywood we all know about his autobiography Every Man a King, as well as Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. To learn more about Earl Long, at a friend’s suggestion I recently purchased Socks on a Rooster by Richard B. McCaughan and The Earl of Louisiana by A.J. Liebling.

So now, according to the painter himself, George Rodrigue is a portrait artist! Just this year, in fact, he painted portraits of President Eisenhower and Andrew Higgins for the National World War II Museum. (See the full story here).

And yet, even though he now admits to painting portraits, that does not change the intent of either his earlier paintings of individual Cajuns or his more recent figurative works. He still uses models to express a comprehensive idea separate and apart from the person posing. There are distinctions, and they’re pretty obvious once one understands George’s concepts.

For example, although he’s painted from photographs of me several times, as with his sons he never, with the possible exception of our wedding invitation (featured in the next blog, Blue Dog Man), approached the paintings as portraits.

With regards to my face and person this remains true today, and my likeness in series such as Jolie Blonde and Bodies, for example, is merely a means to an artistic end that has nothing to do with capturing my portrait or anything about me personally.

And yet when it comes to the Long Brothers, after more than twenty years of denial, George himself admits that these larger-than-life Louisiana characters overtook his intention probably from the moment he applied the last brushstroke to each one’s unmistakable and unique visage.

(Pictured below, George Rodrigue with Clancy DuBos at NOMA 2008, with the article Clancy wrote for Dixie, the Times-Picayune’s Weekly Paper, on November 23^rd, 1980. This was George’s first major press in New Orleans.)

Wendy

Jimmy Domengeaux, George Rodrigue, and a Few Other Louisiana Characters

I assume other states have characters too, but between Governors Huey and Earl Long, singer and trumpet player Louis Prima, Coach Raymond Blanco, the French Quarter’s Ruthie the Duck Lady, Mr. Possum with his vegetable truck, and George’s Uncle Albert (and for that matter, my Uncle Jack) just to name a few, we are inundated. Heck, we elect them, whether famous or infamous, into office on a regular basis.

And maybe on some level (at least in hindsight) that’s a good thing. This is a very interesting place. Just yesterday in the news we learned that our former Governor Edwin Edwards’ biography (on shelves December 14^th) was edited down from 1800 to 640 pages, and of course the story continues, since 2011 marks the end of his ten- year prison term. (pictured, Rodrigue's portrait of Edwards, 1983)

Our former Governor Jimmie Davis (1899-2000) wrote “You Are My Sunshine,” recorded first in 1939 and then hundreds more times and in dozens of languages over the years. George tells a great story about when Davis was inducted into Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Louisiana Legends with a ceremony in 1990. At age 91 he shuffled onto the stage to accept his award, only to return an hour later and introduce his band. George said he stood up straight with bright eyes and a strong voice and had his audience on its feet, everyone dancing and laughing and young again, as they sang along, “You make me happy when skies are grey…” (pictured, Louisiana Legends painted by Rodrigue in 1990 and 1991. Top: Ron Guidry, Ernest Gaines, Gene Callahan, Jimmie Davis, Russell Long, Justin Wilson. Bottom: George Rodrigue, Dr. Michael E. Debakey, Al Hirt, General Robert H. Barrow, USMC, Bob Petit)

Unfortunately I can’t touch on the Long Brothers here, because George’s portraits of them and the stories surrounding those paintings are too …well… long. They are two of my favorite characters, and I know I’m not alone in that assessment, so I’ll post this story in my next blog, Portraits: The Kingfish and Uncle Earl.

My familiarity with many of these characters comes from local tales and especially George’s recollections. But I have been around long enough to witness a few of their defining moments. Most notably, the day I moved to Carmel in 1991 I picked up a newspaper for my last puddle jump and opened it to the headlines, “The Crook, The Nazi, or the Guru: Who Will be Louisiana’s Next Governor?,” a race that also prompted the popular bumper sticker, “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.” At the time Edwin Edwards was fighting charges of corruption; David Duke tried to justify his past post as Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; and Buddy Roemer snapped a rubber band worn on his wrist any time he had a negative thought. Incidentally, the newspaper I read on the plane that day was The Los Angeles Times. (pictured, 1996, 30x40, following David Duke's announcement of his campaign for the U.S. Senate)

Some might say that George Rodrigue is a character too, with his thick Cajun accent and his khee-hee-hee laugh. He’s described often as both down to earth and full of life, and I’m always amazed at the number of people who tell me that they saw him drunk last Mardi Gras or one Galatoire’s Friday, when in fact he hasn’t had a drink in more than twenty years, ever since the varnish fumes affected his liver and nearly killed him (See the blog Oil Paint or Acrylic?). He’s sort of naturally high, I guess, always living in the moment, submerged in every experience. Not only has he retained the ability to see (from the blog Seeing is Understanding), but also he remembers everything, all the way back to age two! (I quiz him on this all of the time, because it’s so hard to believe, especially for someone like me who vaguely recalls a few playground incidents from age six).

Recently he’s talked a lot about an old friend, a character named Jimmy Domengeaux (1907-1988) from Lafayette, Louisiana. In 1968 attorney and former State Senator and U.S. Representative Domengeaux founded the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, known as CODOFIL. Impressed with the initiative, Louisiana Governor John McKeithen pushed through a bill that granted the organization the necessary state credentials and then appointed Domengeaux its president.

By the way, the pronunciation according to George is closer to “DiMaggio,” as in the baseball player.

Domengeaux decided that in order to save the French culture in South Louisiana, he had to save the French language. He was determined to reintroduce French into the public schools. His ambitious goal and his bigger-than-life persona caught the attention of the statewide press, and he constantly was in the news. His idea involved bringing teachers from France and Canada to Louisiana. Not only did he come up with this plan, but also he convinced the French government to fund it! The first one hundred and fifty applicants had a choice of either two years in the French army or two years teaching school in the small town parishes of Louisiana. They lived in private homes and taught the proper French, as opposed to the Cajun dialect, a controversial decision that resulted in mixed and oftentimes negative press for Domengeaux.

Meanwhile, George Rodrigue returned from California and art school in 1967 determined to capture what he saw as his dying culture. He began with the oak trees, a strong symbol of South Louisiana and within four years developed a specific plan: to graphically interpret the Cajun culture on canvas (as described in detail in the blog The Aioli Dinner and a Cajun Artist).

So there’s an interesting parallel between these two men who both, with concerted effort beginning in 1971, hoped, indeed with some sense of desperation, to preserve either through art or language their unique and local heritage, the Cajun culture.

George first met Jimmy Domengeaux through Terry Theriot, an attorney working with Domengeaux in Lafayette during this time. George describes him as sarcastic, flamboyant, and even crude. They hit it off immediately. From the beginning Domengeaux liked George’s paintings because they represented Louisiana’s bygone era, the very thing Domengeaux hoped to save through CODOFIL. George recalls their first meeting when Domengeaux commented that his landscapes reminded him of paintings by Louisiana artist William Henry Buck (1840-1888), several of which Domengeaux hung in his collection.

Coincidentally both George Rodrigue and Jimmy Domengeaux also were drawn together by the press. George was getting nearly as much attention locally and statewide for his Cajun paintings as Domengeaux received for CODOFIL. Oftentimes they appeared in the paper on the same day. (pictured, Rodrigue and Domengeaux with Rodrigue's Broussard's Barber Shop, 1971, 30x40)

They became very good friends. In fact, at Domengeaux’s first statewide CODOFIL meeting held in Nachitoches, Louisiana, he invited George to show his paintings to the French and Canadian dignitaries in attendance. The exhibit of twenty paintings lasted three days. Because George was the only artist invited to participate, his artwork received as much attention as the cause itself in the papers, with photos of the 27-year old Rodrigue with the Consul General of France and the Canadian Prime Minister, as well as other local and state dignitaries. In fact, Domengeaux himself often sought photos with George, certain that the connection helped to further CODOFIL’s mission.

I did describe Domengeaux as ‘crude,’ right? I hardly believe I’m repeating this, but due to George’s amazing memory I do have a few wilder tidbits to share. George says Domengeaux routinely leaned to the side and broke wind as he sat at his desk during meetings, never uttering a word, but just rolling his eyes and grinning. And once he hollered at George across a hotel lobby, “Damn, Rodrigue, if you got any more public relations you’d be a whore!”

But rooted in the fun was a serious mission by two men who loved their state, their culture, and their roots. They could talk each other into almost anything that involved furthering their ambitious agenda to preserve their Cajun heritage. With Domengeaux’s help George had shows in Lafayette for French artists Valadier, Surrier, and Brenot, presenting them with keys to the city and exposing the local population to these French masters. (pictured, artists Valadier, Madame Surrier, Surrier, and Rodrigue; a Valadier painting leans on the floor and a Surrier hangs on the wall)

In addition, Domengeaux arranged for the state of Louisiana to commission a painting from George to be presented to the President of France, Valery Giscard d'Estaing (pictured below; also see the blog Two Publishing Stories: The Cajuns and Blue Dog)

Domengeaux's fame was so significant that in France people thought he was the President of Louisiana. According to George, he had more clout than Governor Edwin Edwards. He got in trouble with the State Department, in fact, for cutting a deal with a foreign government, but somehow Domengeaux charmed his way out of the mess and got what he wanted.

In addition, George's first trip ever to France was on a junket sponsored by CODOFIL. While there he entered his paintings The Class and Jolie Blonde in the 1974 Le Salon in Paris. Upon his return home, he learned that he won an honorable mention in the legendary and prestigious competition for his 1974 painting Jolie Blonde (detailed in its own blog entry here.)

This recognition furthered his resolve to paint his culture, and it strengthened the bond with his friend Domengeaux, a true Louisiana character who supported and shared his goals throughout.

Originally I was going to talk about Domengeaux’s archrival, Dudley LeBlanc, in this blog. However, I got carried away as usual and will have to save his story for another day, lest Cousin Dud not receive the attention his outrageous character deserves.

Wendy

Art School: Lafayette and Los Angeles, 1962-1967

When George Rodrigue entered his senior year at Catholic High School in New Iberia, Louisiana in 1961, his future, to his mind, was certain. He would go to art school and become a professional artist.

His parents, however, had other ideas, determined he have something more steady than his father’s (and grandfather’s) work in brick-laying and construction. They insisted he take a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad Company like his Uncle Albert or with the South Central Bell Telephone Company like his Aunt Bertha (known to the family as “Bertha the Old Maid,” who famously threw out her mother’s bones with the trash). These careers had retirement plans and benefits, and for Marie and Big George, no dream was worth sacrificing young George’s security. But over the years he watched his twenty-two aunts and uncles. He saw them work from nine to five, retire, and sit on the porch, and he grew up going to their funerals. (pictured, Marie Rodrigue, bottom far left, with her brothers and sisters, 1955)

He also watched them pinch pennies long after they established their ‘security.’ In fact he still talks about Uncle Albert, who once rode for free on the train all the way to Chicago for a conference and after learning of the two dollar cab fare, skipped the city and boarded the return train for New Iberia. This same uncle made extra money on the side as a bootlegger, and George remembers him always prepared for a customer, the bottles clanging beneath his overcoat. He dated his girlfriend for forty years, not wanting to purchase a ring or share his ‘security,’ and upon her death perhaps some form of regret finally overtook him, because at age sixty-five he married her sister. Redefining ‘frugal,’ he kept a brick by his bed, and for every nickel wastefully spent, he hit himself in the head.

This was not the life George wanted.

As I mentioned in How Baby George Became an Artist, New Iberia in the 1950s and 1960s could hardly be described as an art community. There was little opportunity for art instruction, much less a job, much less ‘security.’ The obvious place for George to begin his quest was not in New Iberia, but rather the ‘big city’ of Lafayette located twenty-five miles northwest of his hometown. Established in 1900 the University of Southwest Louisiana (now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) is the second largest university in the state and, most important it had (and has) an art department.

George enrolled at USL in 1962. He took nothing but art classes, rejecting the required studies as unnecessary. He had no interest in pursuing a degree (after all, assuming he stayed on course it’s not like he needed a resume), however he wanted formal and intense training in the fine arts. He talks about his years at USL as, more than anything, a stepping stone. Abstract Expressionism was the academic art of the day, and he had no interest in non-representational art. (Nevertheless he describes his instruction in handling color as invaluable). George always says that throughout art school, both at USL and later at Art Center, he knew he was not the best at drawing or painting or rendering. His strength was in his ideas. He could see the others in his class, even his professors, struggling with originality. It’s come easy for George all of his life, and it’s for this reason that he’s often said that the artist he most admires is Salvador Dali. Dali, he says, had incredible ideas. (pictured, Five Balls and Three Indians, both 40x40 inches, 1963; Yes, I was laughing when I typed the titles)

His most important accomplishment at USL was the creation of his design book, a project he worked on for months in Professor Calvin Harlan’s design class. Upon its completion, George felt saturated with the school’s curriculum, and after only four semesters he decided to move on.

But where? There were few art schools in the country in those days, and it’s not like he could have searched the computer or found brochures at a recruitment table. There simply was no resource for finding a way to further his education.

Meanwhile back in New Iberia, like most proud fathers Big George bragged about his son, despite his concerns for his future. By chance, a distant cousin Compton LaBauve (of LaBauve’s jewelry store, where George saw the Joe Grandee exhibition several years before) had on hand brochures from art schools in California and Florida, collected by his own son the previous year. He passed them along to Big George, who passed them along to George.

One school stood out among the others: The Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles (now located in Pasadena). George sent his USL design book to California and waited. It was not until he arrived on campus in the fall of 1964 that he learned that Art Center is a graduate school. They accepted him despite his lack of a college degree.

Imagine George getting on a train in New Iberia and crossing the country for Los Angeles and the west coast. Other than a family vacation to Yellowstone National Park at age eight, he had never been anywhere other than south Louisiana and southeast Texas. To this small-town Cajun, Los Angeles in the 1960s was a foreign land.

He got off of the train with his small suitcase, along with a list of rooms-for-rent provided by the school. He walked the neighborhoods surrounding Art Center, knocking on doors, only to learn that the list was outdated and most houses no longer rented to students. As the sun set on this strange city, he knocked on the last house on the list, wondering where he would sleep that night. To his amazement, a pair of elderly, red-headed twins opened the door and welcomed him. Their previous tenant had moved out that same morning. George remained with them for the next two and a half years. (As talented as George is, he is the first to admit that he has always, in his career as well as nearly every other aspect of his life, been lucky).

(Pictured below: George's landladies and retired vaudeville dancers, Velma and Thelma Little, reunited with George at his first Los Angeles solo show in 1988.)

More than anything else, it was his years at Art Center that gave George the skills and any extra drive he may have needed to pursue a career as a painter. Art Center was (and still is) one of the top art schools in the country, and imagine the L.A. art scene in the mid-1960’s, not to mention the atmosphere of the city itself! George was a serious student, so he claims not to have known the club scene or the concerts or the war protests or all of the things we now associate with California during this time, but he was not oblivious to his surroundings. In fact, just a few months after his arrival R&B singer Sam Cooke was found naked and shot to death in a phone booth less than a block from George’s apartment. The strange story reached the paper in New Iberia, and George’s parents begged him (without success) to return home.

Art Center was known for graphic illustration, advertising design, and automobile design. In addition to the fundamentals of art, George studied design of all kinds.

He made mock album covers for movie soundtracks (his design for "High Noon" pictured below), created short films, designed brochures promoting fictitious American cities, and produced illustrations to sell refrigerators and ovens. (I was mortified and oddly reminded of Mad Men when he described one particular assignment: “What kind of woman do you picture opening a refrigerator door?”).

He also had extensive instruction in photography, including dark room developing and printing, as well as photo essays of the Renaissance Pleasure Fair. (Most people do not realize the significance of photography to George both in his painting design and as its own art form. I definitely will explore this in a blog down the road).

As much as school itself, possibly even more, it was the L.A. art scene that affected George in a way that remained with him throughout his career, even today. Although he took basic art classes such as figure drawing, color studies, and sculpture at Art Center, Abstract Expressionism, as with USL, was the primary focus of his art instruction. (Rodrigue charcoal drawings, 1965)

The city of Los Angeles unwittingly provided additional education. In 1962 Andy Warhol shocked the art world with his exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in L.A. His Brillo Boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, and renditions of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley debuted in regular exhibitions until the gallery closed in 1966.

Although derided by his professors, Pop Art, specifically the idea of taking something from the popular culture and reincorporating it back into that same culture as a piece of art, fascinated George. (pictured, Pop Goes the Ads, 1966 by George Rodrigue, 48x60 inches, paint and collage on plywood)

After intense studies with abstract artist Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978) at Art Center, he already focused on hard edges (evident throughout George’s career, whether Landscapes, Cajuns, or Blue Dogs), but Pop Art included repetitive imagery. In a strange way it was both abstract and representational. (pictured, artist Lorser Feitelson with his 'hard edge' paintings)

It would be impossible to describe George Rodrigue’s style of any period without using terms like hard-edge and repetitive imagery. He’s painted hundreds of hard-edged oak trees, cut off at the top, and stylized into a specific shape; his Cajuns, in his words, are “cut out and pasted” onto Louisiana; his Blue Dog, a hard-edged and repetitive shape no different than his trees, could almost be described as his ‘Campbell’s Soup Can,’ except that unlike Warhol, George invented the image itself as a piece of art.

In March of 1967 George’s father died, and he saw this as a sign to return home. From this point the story continues with Early Oak Trees and a Regrettable Self-Portrait, a blog that details his early struggles with style and acceptance. It also tells of those long drives home from school in Los Angeles, crossing Texas, and how this resulted in his oak tree, an original idea within a long-established genre.

Art school affected George on many levels, none of which, ironically, included a degree. From the USL design book that got him into Art Center, to the instruction of contemporary hard-edge masters such as Lorser Feitelson, to endless hours of traditional studies in figurative drawing, to classes in automotive design (something directly linked to the latest Blue Dog sculptures), to the 1960s Pop Art phenomena, to the atmosphere of Los Angeles itself, and to the long drive home on Route 66, without question art school paved the way for George Rodrigue, the artist.

André and Jacques: The Rodrigue Brothers

George Rodrigue has two sons, André (born 1975) and Jacques (born 1981). They are as accustomed to the question “Do you paint?” as I am, maybe more; however, neither one followed in their dad’s artistic footsteps.

Over the years George has painted his boys many times. Kiss Me, I’m Cajun, featuring André, is probably the most famous. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the Cajun culture was relatively unknown to the world outside South Louisiana in the 1970s, and so imagine George’s surprise when he found this child’s t-shirt at a flea market in Houston, Texas.

He saw this as a sign that the Cajuns had broken out, and that perhaps the rest of the country would learn about this unique culture after all. He commemorated this realization with a painting of a typical Cajun boy holding his cane pole and his catch. The young child leans against a young oak and stares at us.

Soon after he completed it in 1979, the painting graced the back cover of the Lafayette Junior League cookbook, Talk About Good II, which they recently re-printed with flipped covers, placing André’s portrait on the front. It hung last year at the New Orleans Museum of Art’s (NOMA) exhibition Rodrigue’s Louisiana, and André blushed with the attention as he signed cookbooks and posed for pictures. Nearly all Louisiana women know this cookbook, and the accessibility of the original painting (for the first time ever on public display) and especially its tall, dark, and handsome model, was a highlight for many.

George approached this concept again years later with the Blue Dog, an homage to the original painting of André.

Paint Me Back Into Your Life features a young Jacques alongside the Blue Dog and holding a painting. For the photograph George posed Jacques holding a different image – a painting by his brother.

To create the final portrait, however, George sketched his design and left a blank square in place of André’s painting. He then stationed Jacques at his easel with his paints and brushes and asked him to fill in the blank square directly onto the large canvas. Jacques painted an oak tree and because it was the holidays, added Christmas stockings.

Like Kiss Me, I’m Cajun, this charming painting also hung in the NOMA exhibition, where an embarrassed Jacques signed autographs and posed for pictures. In addition, George chose this piece as the signature painting within all materials related to the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts (GRFA).

Other paintings with André and Jacques include friends and traditions, such as André boiling crawfish with Boudreaux, playing ball with Bud Petro, or opening presents with Santa Claus…

…and Jacques playing in the backyard or dancing at the fais do-do.

Tiffany, the family pet, also makes an appearance, pictured here with Jacques, even though she died in 1980, the year before he was born.

I first met André and Jacques in 1991 and spent increasing time with them after George and I started dating in 1993. When we married in 1997, we all lived in Lafayette, Louisiana in a 1950’s plantation-style home located in an old family neighborhood called Bendel Gardens (as in Henri Bendel of New York shopping fame). George’s mother, in her 90’s at the time, also lived with us, as did George’s friend Romain Fruge. We had a busy house with people coming and going all day long, and it was an adjustment for me, after having lived on my own for twelve years. I’m forever grateful to Kay Bowen, who gave me Marcelle Bienvenu’s Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?, a cookbook that saved my life with my new Cajun family and which continues as a staple in my kitchen. (I actually sent a letter to Ms. Bienvenu and told her so --- the only fan letter I’ve ever written).

Game days, something I’d never experienced living with my mom and sister, were huge and meant a dozen or more extra boys. I became adept at one-pot cooking and often harvested from our backyard, where I dug in the dirt most mornings tending to the okra, tomatoes, jalapenos, and blackberries. They were happy days, full of activity and chaos, an interim period really, as we observed George’s aging mother (she died last year at age 103), and as these young boys became young men. Even as kids they were independent and brave, biding their time with hockey, soccer, and girls until before we all knew it they were grown and ready to go off on their own. (pictured: Jacques and André with their grandmother Marie Rodrigue on her 103^rd birthday, and a family friend Joyce Boudreaux)

André lives in Lafayette, where he’s a student of history at the University of Louisiana (ULL). He’s one of the most well-read, intelligent, genuine, and kind-hearted people I’ve ever known. Several years ago we took a family vacation to a Wyoming dude ranch, and when I asked André as he lounged on the front porch what he was reading, he held up The Napoleonic Wars. (In embarrassing contrast, my idea of light reading on that trip was Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates). He’s a collector of soccer jerseys and Star Wars memorabilia and Tide boxes (all sizes). And no matter what the request the answer is always ‘yes.’ He’ll drive twelve hours each way in two days if it means making a friend’s birthday party or helping someone move. His heart is ‘as wide as this world.’* Ten years ago, as he lingered for weeks in a depression of sorts, George and I, worried and at a loss, confronted him and insisted he share his troubles, to which he replied, “China.”

Together with attorney Steve Santillo, André and Jacques own the Blue Dog Café and Jolie’s Louisiana Bistro in Lafayette, Louisiana. André, because he lives in Lafayette, remains involved on a daily basis, whether he’s weighing in on the new menu, brainstorming in promotional meetings, painting the walls around the iron staircase, or making hundreds of seafood wontons in the back.

Jacques lives in New Orleans in an 1850s traditional shot gun house, located just behind our home in the Faubourg Marigny. After graduating from Louisiana State University, he attended Tulane Law School, and (to the great relief of myself and his father) chose to join our business --- the galleries, the foundation, and everything it takes to run both of those entities, along with countless smaller projects. An attorney in the family is convenient, to say the least. He’s vested personally, and so he’s learned to be on call twenty-four hours a day, and he’s no longer surprised by the odd scenarios that often cross his desk. He handles copyright issues, contracts, licensing (specifically for books and non-profit use), and any number of other near-daily legal situations. And, like his brother he’s earned not only our respect, but also that of our staff. He works where he’s needed, whether it’s moving and organizing the warehouse; selling from the galleries; accompanying his dad on book events; lecturing to students about his dad’s work; or helping to oversee construction projects, such as the new Royal Street gallery. (pictured: father and sons as The Blues Brothers)

With all of our good fortune, the thing we are most grateful for, most pleased with, is George’s sons. George is a proud father to be sure, and he encourages his boys in their passions, even if it means expanding the warehouse to include ten more boxes of collectible action figures, or approaching his publisher with the latest edition of the Bear Head calendar. He takes them seriously in all of their endeavors, and he never denies them anything if possible.

I asked him about this once. I’ve already written in the blog “How Baby George Became an Artist,” about his mother’s insistence that he ‘get a real job.’ But he also told me a story about having saved his pennies for months to buy a telescope, only to have his parents return it, claiming it was a waste of money. Similarly, the last present he received from them was Christmas 1954. He was ten years old, and they felt it was no longer necessary. He decided as a boy that his own children would have everything they wanted, and he’s done his best in that regard. Are they spoiled? Surprisingly not, and even more surprising, they rarely ask for anything excessive. In fact, in recent years they rarely ask for anything at all.

For me, although André and Jacques are not my children, they are my family. I’ve collected these pictures and saved this blog for several months, wanting to post it now, the week of Thanksgiving. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that nothing is more important than family, and as we head to our rented cabin in the Smoky Mountains, meeting more family for a week of board games and BMX and turkey, I am immensely thankful.

I wish you the same.

Wendy

*as said by yogi Sarah Powers: “Let your heart be as wide as this world.”

Blue Dog: Out of Control, 1993-1995

By 1993 the Blue Dog had far-reaching fame. After the success of Absolut Louisiana the previous year, Michel Roux of Carillon Importers commissioned Absolut Rodrigue, which appeared full page in hundreds of magazines that year, and continued in hundreds more in the following. As recently as this past summer, it was the most highlighted of sixteen Absolut art pieces, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and others, at the Galway Art Festival in Ireland.

More than anything else it was Absolut Rodrigue that caused an overnight change in the Blue Dog’s popularity. I remember that year with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Unlike the early years when people walked into the gallery with the question “What’s with this blue dog?,” after Absolut Rodrigue they announced, “I’ve seen this dog!” Or more often some version of, “Oh my gosh; this is it, the real thing!”

Local people in New Orleans and Carmel, California were accustomed for some time to the paintings by this point. I believe that many of them think that the paintings and prints are everywhere. But, not so. (Thus, the shocked tourists…) The lessons George learned in selling his landscapes and Cajun paintings serve him well, and he’s often said that had he discovered the Blue Dog twenty years earlier he would have ruined it. Instead, he’s cautious and protective. He avoids wholesaling, mass production, and products (other than books), so that the only place people find his work is in his own galleries in New Orleans and Carmel. This was long before his internet presence as well, so the galleries relied on foot traffic and the occasional news article to spread the word. When the Absolut Rodrigue ad hit full page everything from Vanity Fair to Newsweek to People Magazine, it had the same effect nationally that the window of Blue Dog paintings had locally that Super Bowl Sunday of 1990 in New Orleans. Just as people stopped dead in their tracks before the window, people tore the ads from magazines and taped them to their refrigerator or hung them on their dorm room wall.

Occasionally some skeptic gripes about George’s over-commercialization and ‘sell-out status,’ using the Absolut (and Xerox) campaign as an example. However, it’s important to note that George turns down countless offers for everything from t-shirts to umbrellas, not to mention product endorsements, movies, and cartoons. Absolut’s promotion is famous as an art campaign. Remember, George’s background at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s centered on the graphic arts and advertising design. The Absolut opportunity was exciting for him, as much from an art and advertising angle as it was for the exposure and name recognition. Absolut Vodka’s art campaign caused a sensation from the beginning, and George was in good company with several hundred other major American artists since that first Andy Warhol ad of 1985. (Xerox, and more importantly the opportunity to work with Young & Rubicam, is a similar story, featured in the blog Blue Dog 2000).

In addition to Absolut Vodka, the years between 1993 and 1995 saw the publication of the book Blue Dog, museum exhibitions in Bloomington, Illinois, Pensacola, Florida, and Frankfurt, Munich, Greven, and Landshut, Germany, a SOHO exhibition in New York City, a new Rodrigue Gallery in Munich, Germany, a poster for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and George himself as King of the Washington Mardi Gras (hosted in Washington D.C. each year by the Louisiana delegation).

By the end of 1993, the galleries were hopping. I remember working seven days a week, opening the Carmel gallery some days at 7 AM just to catch up with the previous day’s paperwork, and because the gallery was exciting and full of people all of the time. It’s true; I even sold a painting early one morning to a jogger on his way down to the beach.

In one month we sold twenty-six paintings in Carmel. We looked like we’d gone out of business for several months after. Yet it was a fight to convince George’s agent to raise prices, and as a result every new piece sold within a day or two of arrival.

For George the success was bittersweet. Yes, the money was great – the best he’d ever known – but he was painting twenty hours a day, and in two years, up until late 1995, he completed more than five hundred paintings. (Staggering when one considers the 35-40 paintings per year he completes now). Also, as I’ve detailed before, he struggled during this period with the switch from oil to acrylic paint. He painted countless simple 9x12 and 11x14 canvases (sizes he abandoned permanently more than ten years ago) with single dogs and plain backgrounds. Bills mounted for complex personal legal issues, and relationships with his agent increasingly were strained. There was no time to think about meaning or direction, and it was seldom that George painted for himself. If ever the Blue Dog was a runaway train, this was the period.

I don’t mean to describe an atmosphere of consistent artistic doom and gloom. There were some real highlights in this period too, especially the large-scale pieces for the SOHO exhibition in 1994, with canvases eight-foot square and larger (two are pictured below). I think George would agree, however, that his overall output between late 1993 and 1995 was pressured, forced – similar to those family portraits and festival posters of the mid-late 1980s.

George and I had been dating for a while by this time, and I witnessed the ‘machine’ and worried. Despite his agent’s protests, I doubled the prices of every piece in the Carmel gallery overnight. We continued to sell, but fewer paintings, and yet we made more money. New Orleans was forced to follow. At last George slowed down, and by 1996 he created half as many paintings (still considerable), and by 1997 only a handful. From that point on, he had control again and painted slowly and deliberately, what and when he wanted. But these creative, inspired years are the next phase, and so I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that the Blue Dog’s meaning continues to evolve. What began as the loup-garou and then the ghost of Tiffany melded into a signature of sorts during the mid-1990s. It lost any concrete definition in favor of pure phenomena, undefined, even though occasionally it referenced those early meanings and foreshadowed at least a few to come.

In the galleries the sales staff talked about the loup-garou and Tiffany. We were all pretty adept by this time, and we each discussed the paintings in the ways that they appealed to us personally. Not everyone knows the loup-garou, and not everyone has a dog that looks like the Blue Dog. More than anything we relied on the art itself, as opposed to some contrived ‘meaning’ to carry the weight. And it did, as has it always. It’s just like George used to say about his paintings of Cajun folk life. They rarely sold in Louisiana as one would expect; rather, they sold to people in other states around the country, states without Cajuns, because in the end it’s the art itself, how it’s painted, the style, the context, and the man behind it (I can say that as the wife) that makes it different than…well…some other dog painting.

Wendy

For a complete history of the Blue Dog leading up to this post, see (1) Blue Dog: In the Beginning, 1984-1989, (2) Blue Dog: The Ghost of Tiffany, 1990-1992, and following this post (4) Blue Dog Man, 1996-1999, (5)Blue Dog 2000, The Year of Xerox, (6) Blue Dog: The Abstract Paintings, 2001-2003

Contemporary Art, Chefs, Fashion, and Scouting (in Las Vegas?)

George Rodrigue has epiphanies at the strangest times. He’s written movie scripts on airplane sick bags, designed cars in the middle of the night, and composed country western songs while changing light bulbs.

Yesterday he emerged from the shower with a declaration: “I know why the general public can’t relate to contemporary art.” Then he clarified with “well…..most contemporary art.”

This truly came out of nowhere. We hadn’t discussed contemporary art that morning, nor have we been to a museum in several weeks; in fact, the last thing he said to me as he stepped into the shower was “Iron my pink shirt.”

He went on to explain that the mediums themselves are the biggest problem. In contemporary literature the thing itself is still a book, with pages and words, a beginning and an end, and a narrative of some sort. But in art, the medium is felt and fat (Beuys), bugs and cigarettes (Hirst), vacuum cleaners and sharks (Koons), or any number of installations from recent art fairs (my apologies for not recalling the artists), such as an empty white room, or a repeated “boom” in a tent, or a copy machine suspended from the ceiling, spitting out blank paper so that it falls on the visitor’s head one slow piece at a time. Paint on canvas is passé, and in the world of contemporary art, George Rodrigue is a dinosaur.

He goes further, commenting on borderline contemporary/modern artists: he gets Motherwell and his Elegies (pictured below), Indiana and his words and numbers, and Oldenburg and his giant safety pin. He appreciates the tension between positive and negative spaces, the idea of a word changing a meaning or the other way around (we have an entire set of Indiana’s Numbers circling the walls of our living room), and the process of taking something completely ordinary and increasing its size to an absurd scale, turning it into something utterly unordinary (and pretty cool, I might add).

He gets these artists, but he doesn’t get others: Ruscha, Holzer, and Kruger with their single words and electronic or stenciled messages, or Kiki Smith with her animals and aborted babies and glass stars in a corner.

… All of whom I rather like, which makes for great discussions. And although he won’t admit it, the feminism probably irks him; remember, in many ways, but not all ways, George is old school…. 1950s New Iberia, Hank Williams, paint on canvas and all. Also, I think a lot of his artist-hierarchy has to do with which artist he discovered first, regardless of their true timing, after which he sees any others as mere copycats. Along these same lines, I find it ironic that George’s 40-foot installation on the New Orleans Sheraton includes the words, “Art is a timeless expression of a moment,” a statement with resonance if one considers Bruce Nauman’s neon sign from 1967: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” However, I don’t dare point that out.

“It boils down to a lack of originality,” he says. A walk through contemporary art galleries today always instigates a bombast:

“What if a person filled an entire book with nothing but the word sometimes? Do you think the public would go for that? Would the Pulitzer committee? Meanwhile, the art world goes crazy.”

He has a point.

He gets Rothko (my favorite) and his floating planes of color; he absolutely gets and seems most drawn to Pollock and the drip paintings; and he even gets Newman, although he finds the art simplistic and rather boring, since (to him) the reduction of shapes to one straight line is so obvious as to hardly be worthy of contemplation.

I had to laugh when we visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York a few weeks ago and as we stared at a large red Newman (1950, 18 feet, pictured below), I asked “Well?” To which George replied quite seriously, “He should have left that last line on the right off.”

We’re in Las Vegas this weekend, a place devoid of contemporary art as far as I can tell, unless one contemplates the entire strip as one big contrived installation, as though it’s some cosmic diorama, a snippet of the surreal. Everything is exaggerated here. When poised between the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and an erupting volcano, even the full moon seems like a stage set.

Las Vegas is a place where packs of wild girls in little, and I mean little, black dresses toss their ironed hair simultaneously while texting the guys they met last night in LIGHT (or MIST or FOG or DIRT or whatever), all while planning tomorrow’s coordinated wardrobe: skin-tight low rise jeans, cuffed high at the ankle to reveal stiletto booties in purple or snakeskin or both.

It’s a place where a cocktail purist like me replaces the olives in my occasional martini with even more indulgent blue cheese stuffed olives, because the plain ones seem too boring for this setting, too dull beneath the original Botero or Picasso or Renoir hanging above the bar in the artist-inspired restaurants. (It’s a place where we all become snobs in one form or another).

It’s a place to see Tom Jones or Cher, to remember when… and not feel guilty about it, and to wear an evening gown (or a sequined bikini – yes, we saw it with our own eyes) to dinner, because nostalgia, exaggeration, and bad taste are the norms here.

I’m going to have a party in Las Vegas one day and require all of the female guests to wear wedding gowns.

Yes, we’re in a strange diorama where anything goes, from the most charitable to the most selfish. Even the shallowest observations provide food for thought and probably subconsciously lead George’s mind into ‘thoughts on contemporary art while taking a shower.’

How appropriate that yesterday afternoon we stumbled on a contemporary architectural wonder currently under construction and housing a hospital specializing in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s treatments. The Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health was founded in Las Vegas by Larry Ruvo in memory of his father. Never one to think small, Ruvo hired architect Frank Gehry, most famous for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, to design the building. It’s halfway through construction, and we lucked out with a tour that my college art history professors would have fainted over.

But the real reason we’re in Las Vegas is for Chef Emeril Lagasse’s Carnivale du Vin, a fundraiser benefiting his foundation and its many projects, including in New Orleans the Edible Schoolyard, Café Reconcile, St. Michael’s School and more. (below: with Alden and Emeril Lagasse)

George is the official artist this year, the event’s fifth anniversary, meaning the room was filled with Blue Dog images alongside star chefs like Mario Batali and Charlie Trotter, musicians like the Neville Brothers and Sammy Hagar, and top winemakers and sports figures and business people, all here to support these worthwhile programs with contributions of their time, talents, and money. For George’s part, in addition to the Blue Dog image use, he donated the original painting Heat in the Kitchen, which brought $105,000 during the live auction for the Emeril Lagasse Foundation.

Here we are in this city of over-indulgence and waste, and yet we’re part of a non-profit machine that raised millions of dollars in one weekend for educational programs, scholarships, job training, and other opportunities in every community where Emeril operates. It was exciting to see this kind of enthusiasm and generosity for youth programs, particularly during these times of economic uncertainty, and also while we launch similar programs through the newly-founded George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts. (below: Mario Batali at his station; Aaron Neville on stage)

As to the party itself, there is nothing better than a Second Line dance to “When the Saints Go Marching In,” performed by the Neville Brothers. And it was a real kick to overhear George and Daniel Boulud discuss boudin and cracklin’! (below: dancing to the Neville Brothers with Wayne Fernandez; Jacques and George with Daniel Boulud)

For some reason, in addition to contemporary art, outrageous fashion, and creative cuisine, this weekend in Sin City also lead George on a lengthy walk down memory lane (must have been the Donny and Marie sign). He talked about his years at Philmont Scout Ranch along with a poignant moment involving a broom at Camp Thistlewaite, where he worked in the supply store. But now I’ve really digressed, so more on this in some Eagle Scout blog down the road.

Oh, what the heck: in 1959, as he swept that last corner of dirt on that last day of the summer in his last year of camp, he had an epiphany: “I will never sweep another broom, and I will never work for someone else.”

And so he hasn’t.

Wendy

A History of Evangeline in Rodrigue Paintings

There are enough Rodrigue Evangelines to fill an entire museum exhibition. He’s painted the Acadian heroine one hundred or more times over nearly forty years. Like Jolie Blonde, the Oak Tree, and the Blue Dog, she is a staple in his work, a protagonist as much for him as she is in the story of Acadiana.

Famously portrayed in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Evangeline: A Tale of Arcadie, from 1847, this mythical heroine followed the path of the ancestors of many Cajuns, including George Rodrigue. She lived as a young woman in the town of Grand Pré in Nova Scotia where, according to Longfellow,

“Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.

Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the way-side.

Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses!”

Her lover, her fiancée Gabriel, “a mighty man in the village and honored by all men,” was the son of Basil the blacksmith. Among her many suitors, it was only Gabriel who won her heart.

But their star-crossed fate emerged when the British invaded Nova Scotia in 1755 and when, along with their friends and families, they learned,

"…that all your lands, and dwellings, and cattle of all kinds

Forfeited be to the crown; and that you yourselves from this province

Be transported to other lands. God grant you may dwell there

Ever as faithful subjects, a happy and peaceable people!

Prisoners now I declare you; for such is his Majesty’s pleasure!”

In the persecution that followed, Evangeline and Gabriel were separated, and she spent the rest of her long life searching for him, mostly through the swamps and prairies of southwest Louisiana, a path she took having heard he had done the same:

“…a maiden who waited and wandered,

Lowly and meek in spirit, and patiently suffering all things.

Fair was she and young; but, alas! before her extended,

Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its pathway

Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered before her,

Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and abandoned….”

Reunited in old age, Evangeline, now a nun, tended to Gabriel in the last few minutes of his life, when she happened upon him by chance as she cared for the sick in Pennsylvania.

It’s a heartbreaking, romantic story --- the vision of Evangeline wandering for years along the banks of the Bayou Teche and beneath the splendid Louisiana oaks. The legend inspires many artists, and its mystique is so great that the towns of New Iberia and St. Martinville disputed the location of the 'Evangeline Oak,' purportedly the place she wept and “stood like one entranced.” George’s mother remembers the public controversy in the 1920s when both cities claimed this landmark tree. Although St. Martinville eventually won out, for many residents any grand and ancient oak in southwest Louisiana deserves the title.

“As, through the garden gate, beneath the brown shade of the oak-trees,

Passed she along the path to the edge of the measureless prairie.”

From the beginning Evangeline was a natural painting subject for George. He also incorporated her into his first major public sculpture. (below, George Rodrigue with his bronze statue of Longfellow, Evangeline, and Gabriel, Kaliste-Saloom Office Park, Lafayette, Louisiana, installed 1983)

He used several models for Evangeline over the years, including a waitress he barely knew, a silent movie actress he never knew, and most often the daughter of his good friends Bertha and Curtis Bernard. (below, actress Dolores del Rio as Evangeline, from Rodrigue’s Saga of the Acadians, 1984-1989)

He photographed Diane Bernard Keogh hundreds of times during several sessions in the 1970s and used these same photographs for Evangeline paintings over the next twenty years. In an ironic twist that Evangeline herself would appreciate, Diane came to work for George in 1996 and remains an important part of Rodrigue Studio today.

“…Stood she, and listened and looked, until, overcome by emotion,

“Gabriel!” cried she aloud with tremulous voice; but no answer

Came from the graves of the dead, nor the gloomier grave of the living”

“Olden memories rose, and loud in the midst of the music

Heard she the sound of the sea, and an irrepressible sadness

Came o’er her heart, and unseen she stole forth into the garden.”

“Sweet on the summer air was the odor of flowers in the garden;

And she paused on her way to gather the fairest among them…”

“Fuller of fragrance then they, and as heavy with shadows and night-dews,

Hung the heart of the maiden.”

People usually are surprised to learn that George never abandons a subject. He adds to and manipulates those symbols and shapes that he’s made his own. As with the Louisiana oak tree, Evangeline too remained important on his canvas well into the Blue Dog Series. In the early 1990s when he painted at a side building at Landry’s Restaurant in Henderson, Louisiana, he photographed one of the restaurant’s employees and adopted her image as a modern-day Evangeline. (below:1992, 24x30, 1995, 72x36)

At the same time, he continued to use photographs of Diane Bernard and other models in contemporary designs of Louisiana oaks, the Blue Dog, and Evangeline. (below, 1992, 24x20; 1995, 48x60)

Admittedly, it’s been some time since George has painted Evangeline. However, I would be surprised if she never appeared on his canvas again: “Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished.”

Jolie Blonde, however, appears regularly in Rodrigue paintings today, as she has since he first painted her in 1974. (I’m afraid I unwittingly swayed the artist in this case.)

But in this story we pay tribute to Evangeline who swooned,

“O Gabriel! O my beloved!”Art thou so near unto me, and yet I cannot behold thee?

Art thou so near unto me, and yet thy voice does not reach me?

Ah! how often thy feet have trod this path to the prairie!

Ah! how often thine eyes have looked on the woodlands around me!

Ah! how often beneath this oak, returning from labor,

Thou hast lain down to rest, and to dream of me in thy slumbers.

When shall these eyes behold, these arms be folded about thee?”

… perhaps a heroine not just for Louisiana, but for all who search for love.

Wendy

*All quotes in this blog are from Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published 1847

Oil Paint or Acrylic?

After experimenting in art school with several mediums, including designer colors, pastel, water color, and chalk, George Rodrigue settled on oil paint to create his dark landscapes of Louisiana oak trees in 1969. In those days money was a real concern, and he was aware that each stroke of his brush equated to less paint in the tube. To make the paints last, he thinned them with turpentine, and as a result today many of those early landscapes are cracking.

By the time he incorporated Cajun figures into his work, money was better, and George was careful not to overly thin the paints. He painted in oil for more than twenty years, eventually creating thick oil canvases, layered and piled up. These glistening, jewel-like works required months to dry, and their dark tones and subtle blending showed off best following several treatments (both initially and on-going) of spray varnish.

For years George painted in small, enclosed rooms, first in the back of an advertising agency owned by his friend Kenny Bowen in Lafayette, Louisiana, then in the attic of his Jefferson Street home, and finally in a side shed off of Landry’s Restaurant in Henderson, Louisiana. The unventilated spaces and the humid Louisiana air required air conditioning, which meant window units straining and humming through the hot summer months. I think of him painting in this environment, with Roy Orbison or Hank Williams playing on his radio, his friends Dickie Hebert, Romain Fruge, or Bud Petro stopping by throughout the day with the latest gossip (in Dickie’s case), stories of the previous night’s female conquest (in Romain’s case), and a newly-perfected duck call (in Bud’s case). They’d drag him out for an oyster po’ boy or a bowl of gumbo, and he’d laugh and relax before returning to his studio and remaining at his easel oftentimes into the middle of the night. (below: George in his first office; Dickie helping out in the studio. Both early-mid 1970s)

In addition to the studio time, those years included adventures of life on the road, traveling to meet collectors and sell paintings, usually with Bud or Romain along for the ride. But those stories are better saved for another blog.

For this story, I’m picturing George alone, inside a closed room, quiet in the late night, and surrounded, engulfed, living in, drowning in ….fumes.

He used heavy oil paints and turpentine. And each evening or early morning, before he turned in, he sprayed his canvas, the air, and his lungs with varnish. It coated his insides and poisoned him, and in 1984 he was hospitalized for several months, weak, dizzy, and without the energy to paint or to play with his kids or even to think.

The doctors ran tests and sent him home, having no idea what caused the problem. He stopped painting for six months, and he felt better, and still no one, not even him, connected his illness to the toxins present in his everyday life.

He went back to his easel.

Two years later he collapsed again. This time the doctors asked, “Do you work around chemicals?” They solved the mystery and diagnosed George with hepatitis. It was killing him. The cure? He was told to never paint again.

You can imagine this devastating news! Not only was painting his career path and the means of supporting his family, but also it was (and is) his life, no different than eating or sleeping. It’s true that George goes long stretches without painting, sometimes three or four months, but he knows it’s there, waiting, and he does the rest, the selling, the schmoozing, the books, the interviews, so that he can get back to his easel. Without that, the rest is for naught. Without that, I think he would sink into a depression; he would cease to function.

That’s what he faced, and he was scared.

He begged his doctor for an alternative. The only solution was to wear a gas mask hooked to a tank -----a prospect inhibiting for anyone, but impossible for this creative free spirit. Nevertheless, he painted under these difficult conditions for a number of years before it became unbearable.

George never accepts situations like this. He works out solutions to things the rest of us might find impossible. And in this case the answer, on the surface, was surprisingly simple: acrylics.

Acrylic paint, a water-based paint, was invented in the 1950s and became available in artist colors in the 1960s. It’s a fast-drying paint, completely different from oils, and the change for George would not be an easy one. As I mentioned above, oil paints take months to dry, and he could re-work areas and smooth things out and scrape and shift and blend and create new colors right on the canvas.

With acrylics, however, he had no opportunity to go back and make changes. An area was dry within minutes, and by the time he rolled his chair back and lowered his glasses to look from a distance, it was too late to manipulate that area of paint he’d applied only thirty minutes before. The process was a complete change for him. But there were no fumes, no dizziness, and no danger, and he was determined.

Coincidentally, it was about this time that George began in earnest the Blue Dog Series. Although the early loup-garou paintings were rooted in the bayou, and many of the Tiffany paintings of the early 1990s included elaborate settings and backgrounds, the series grew increasingly abstract. I’ll save an in-depth look at the paintings of the mid-1990s for another blog, but it’s important to note here that George’s learning process is evident in these paintings. Most works from this period include very simple, flat backgrounds, not because that’s necessarily what he wanted (as he may decide with a Blue Dog painting today), but because he couldn’t figure out what else to do. He struggled with these paints, and he taught himself to approach his work in a completely new way.

It took several years and probably a hundred or more paintings before he felt somewhat adjusted to this fast-drying paint. I remember him complaining repeatedly about the problems of working with it. I also remember panicking when on several occasions, in a fit of frustration after painting a solid, one-color background, he would take his canvas outside, break out his old paints, and paint the dog itself in oil. It wasn’t until maybe eight or ten years ago that I first heard him tell an interviewer that he likes and even sometimes prefers working in acrylics. By that time he’d been using them nearly ten years. (2003, 60x60, acrylic on canvas; 2006, 48x30, acrylic on canvas)

But again, the nature of the Blue Dog paintings and the direction he seemed to be taking them, lent itself to acrylic paint. (George says the Blue Dog 'saved his life.') The colors are brighter and more intense than oils. On occasion George paints right out of the tube, without blending. He produces clean lines without risk of smudging the paint he applied the hour before ---now already dry. In some ways, his paintings of this period started to look more like his silkscreens ----an odd observation, since one would think it would be the other way around.

By the late 1990s George was comfortable with acrylics. His only regular complaint concerned the human figure. He claimed it was impossible to paint a woman with acrylics:

“A woman has to be soft. I have to be able to blend without producing thick layers. Otherwise she looks rough, like a man.”

As recently as 2004 when he painted Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco’s portrait, he thought he’d overcome that obstacle. However, after finishing the painting in acrylic, he was unhappy with her face, finding the build-up of paint too rough.

There was no way to begin the face again on that same canvas. After weeks of work, he started completely over on a new canvas and this time painted only her face in oil.

These challenges increased as George thought more about returning to figurative painting. He wasn’t interested in traditional Cajun genre scenes anymore, but he wanted to explore a new path, specifically the classic nude.

About this time he learned of a new paint, a water-based oil. There is no turpentine. There are no fumes. It still needs the spray varnish, but George’s long-time assistant Douglas Shiell takes on this task himself, wearing a mask and working outdoors.

Like a giddy kid, beginning in 2002 George explored the nude figure on canvas in a series of paintings and prints he eventually called Bodies. The first eight or ten paintings ---probably a year’s worth of work in 2002 ---ended up in the closet. It was a shocking reminder for me that George is still learning. One would think that by this time every stroke is perfect and every painting deserving of public display. But that’s not the case at all, at least not in George’s eyes. What also surprised me was his patience. He wasn’t frustrated by inferior works but rather lined them up in the studio, studied them, shut them in the closet, and began again. Actually, he seemed obsessed, and he enjoyed it like a scientist discovering a new planet.

By 2005, after more than three years of work, he had five complete un-closeted Bodies paintings. He used these to create the final series of remastered digital prints, but again, better saved for another blog.

Today George paints in both acrylic and oil (the new water-based oil, that is). He’s comfortable in both mediums, and he chooses the paint according to the painting. In some cases, a canvas may include both. (below: 2009, 36x48, oil on canvas; 2008, 30x30, acrylic on canvas)

In the past two years he even revisited landscape painting with the water-based oils. (below: 2009, 15x30, oil on canvas; 2009, 24x48, oil on canvas)

Forty years after those first turpentine-thinned, cracking oils, he squirts his paint onto his palette in large dollops. He paints with verve and without restrictions. His studio still bustles with visitors --- his sons Jacques and André, his football buddies Tony and Rich, and even Dickie, his oldest friend, who still drops in with the latest Cajun joke. George still paints through the night, and Elvis and Johnny Cash play on the radio. I guess the biggest change is in the past few months, when the music, the conversation, and even the paintbrush drops as a result of that current New Orleans delirium – Saints football.

Wendy

Eisenhower and Higgins: A New Historical Painting

How do I explain a painting rooted in war? How does someone like me write about it in such a way that doesn’t offend the anti-war Americans (a position I respect immensely), or the veterans (a position I also respect immensely), but rather expresses pride for our country and compassion for our fellow human beings? How do I write about this subject in such a way that expresses not a political viewpoint, but a humanitarian one; not an expression of arrogance or superiority, but one of compassion and equality?

Maybe the questions explain my ignorance, my privileged, peaceful life, my foggy vision, or maybe, just maybe, the answer for someone like me and for George Rodrigue is art.

In September 2003, on the second anniversary of 9/11, George Rodrigue teamed up with the International Child Art Foundation (ICAF). He printed an original silkscreen image, Honesty, which he created from paintings of peace by children from one hundred countries.

He sold these silkscreen prints and raised $350,000 --- enough money to send the children and their art teachers and a parent to Washington D.C. for a week-long art workshop on the National Mall. There, George painted with these one hundred children, as well as another fifty (one from each of the United States) to create a pyramid for peace, a project he designed as an artistic symbol, and one that tours America today with that message. Even though we speak different languages, and we worship in different ways, and we adhere to different laws and customs, we still all want peace. In art, we all speak the same language.

It was an incredible experience. I saw children from the Ukraine and Saudi Arabia and Guatemala and Iowa painting a conversation and becoming friends. Maybe these children will remember the experience as strongly as I do. Maybe they’ll think twice before ordering attacks on their friends.

*****

My parents discovered in 1966 that they were pregnant with me when my mother lived in the Philippines, a place she remained for more than a year so that she’d be close to my father, who was flying and fighting and dutifully following orders in the Vietnam War. My dad, an American patriot who, although he never refers to it other than the quick change of channels when Jane Fonda appears on the TV screen, no doubt felt the late 1960s and early 1970s homegrown anti-Americanism on his own back porch. I can’t imagine this salt in the wound, after he knew first-hand the human-inflicted pain on friends and strangers, after he followed the orders of superior officers he respected, after he fought for the mission directed by his country.

*****

George Rodrigue was summoned for his physical in 1967. He knew afterwards that a draft call was imminent. Having married and lost his father that same year, he applied for a deferment. He was an only child, and his mother relied on him to manage the family’s affairs.

Fearful of the outcome, he joined the National Guard, only to receive his permanent deferment one week later. Those six years in the National Guard deserve a blog or two on their own, so more to come later….

But the fact that he never saw combat (although his experiences with the Selma Civil Rights March and later as a photographer for Spiro Agnew are not to be discounted, trust me…), did not diminish his patriotism. He’s known the honor of painting three American Presidents (Reagan, 1988, Bush, 1989, Clinton, 1997), and his paintings such as Louisiana Hayride (1972), God Bless America (2001, following 9/11), and We Will Rise Again (2005, following Hurricane Katrina), reinforce that commitment to American imagery and pride.

In January 2009 the D-Day Museum in New Orleans approached George Rodrigue for help with their own American imagery. They explained their $350 million expansion, to be unveiled early November 2009, along with their new credentials and title: The National World War II Museum. They wanted to know from George,

“Will you paint a Blue Dog to celebrate and benefit our expansion?”

George wondered (as anyone would), “What does a Blue Dog have to do with World War II?”

But he gave the idea some thought anyway. And when he met with them again, he had a plan:

“My wife and I have been long-standing members of this museum, and I’ve always thought that there was something missing, and it’s not the Blue Dog. I want to paint General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) and Andrew Higgins (1886-1952) side by side – two men who never met, who never had their photograph taken together, but who lead the allies to victory. And after all, it’s because of Higgins that the museum belongs in New Orleans.”

And George is right. It was Eisenhower who claimed that Higgins, owner and founder of Higgins Industries, “won the war for us,” and it was this understanding that prompted Eisenhower’s biographer Stephen Ambrose to place the museum here.

And lucky us. Of all of our many museum memberships, this is the only one I always renew in person. The veterans are there, volunteering to sign us up, wanting to visit and tell their stories. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Do it quick. We’re losing them.

Higgins built the boats that carried the soldiers to the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Unlike the traditional metal boats, these vessels were made of wood and did not trigger the mines floating along the waves. It was because of these boats that so many of our men landed safely. It was because of these boats that D-Day is the historical victory we know. Never before has George Rodrigue been so honored by a commission (actually, a commission he accepted without compensation, but rather he gave the painting to his sons, André and Jacques, who then donated it to the museum). He worked on this piece six months. The first three months were not what one would expect. They were on the computer…..

He played with photos of Higgins and Eisenhower, searching for the right look. Eisenhower’s face alone took him weeks, and I must say that I was astounded by the outcome. It reminded me of his painting of former Louisiana Governor Earl Long, full of the character of the man --- in Eisenhower’s case, a General, resolute and proud, a real leader who would win a war against evil; and in Earl’s case .... well .... crazy and colorful, screaming into the microphone. (below, Uncle Earl, 1989)

And then there was Higgins: a 1950s New Orleans businessman who looked like my grandfather Felix 'Mac' McClanahan (a WW II veteran) or everyone’s “Cousin” Dudley LeBlanc or any other larger-than-life New Orleans businessman character of the time.

After the portraits, George sketched trees and then scanned them into his computer, playing in Adobe Illustrator with designs, including a jeep and a shipyard, and a chalkboard with boat plans. He knew the canvas would have to be big --- larger than life-size --- and to work out that design by hand would have taken a year or more. He equates his work on the computer to what artists used to call ‘thumbnail sketches.’ By creating the outline before he picks up the brush, he begins the painting with more confidence and avoids a panic about incorrect design or placement.

After all of that, however, I’ll never forget the changes once he started painting.

First, there was the morning I walked in and George (after painting all night) had whited out a flag. His original design included an American flag and a Louisiana flag. But when hanging at an angle, the Louisiana flag was hard to discern. He worried that no one would recognize the pelican caught in the folds. So after having painted the Louisiana flag, he whited it out and began again, replacing it with a second American flag.

Next, there was the shocking morning I walked in to find one third of the painting missing. He had whited out huge sections, moving the oak tree edge on both the left and right of the figures and, even more astounding, the entire jeep! It was gone! He shifted that jeep three times before he was satisfied with its size and placement.

And then there’s Eisenhower’s pants. Good grief, if only I had videotaped how excited and proud George was about those pants!

And the last, and I think (for him) the most brutal area was Andrew Higgins’ hands, which he whited out, left for days, and re-painted I don’t know how many times. (And which he still is not wholly satisfied with, but he’s just had enough).

Looking at the painting, who would know? George swears he’ll never do another painting on this scale and with this complexity. But I don’t believe him. He really enjoyed it. Myself, I can brag of one small contribution. I asked George to change the Higgins shipyard building so that on its side it reads “New Orleans.”

The very last change he made was when he added the “WWII” at the bottom of the oak --- something he did, once again, in the middle of the night, alone and quiet, when he seems to think best.

Once he finished the painting this past August, now titled Victory on Bayou St. John, we had an unveiling party in our home in Carmel Valley, California for forty friends. Believe it or not, it was the first unveiling of his life. Surrounded by some of his dearest friends, he uncovered the painting to oooh’s and ahhh’s and, most special, to the angelic voice of his friend Myles Williams, a former singer for the New Christy Minstrels, who lead us all in patriotic sing-a-longs.

(below: the painting, as being installed in the WW II Museum on Nov 4th and Rodrigue with his son Jacques on Nov 5th)

It was a meaningful and special afternoon, made all the more so by our new French friends Nadine and Didier visiting from Lyon, France. Didier told us that although he was a young boy at the time, he remembers D-Day, and that if it were not for the Americans, for Eisenhower, for the Higgins boats, and for the jeeps (he really emphasized the jeeps) he would not be here today. And this gracious Frenchman thanked me --- as though I could ever be worthy of this gentleman’s gratitude --- with an embrace and with tears on his cheek.

So what is a person to do? On the one hand we want peace ---- I mean, don’t we ALL WANT PEACE? And on the other hand, we meet a Didier who knows his life would be different, who suggests it would be less than what it is, if it were not for our involvement, if not for the lives lost, the injuries sustained, the risks taken. What of the women in Afghanistan? Everyday girls are born into a world that finds them stupid, unworthy of education, undeserving of a walk in the park on a pretty day. Can we stop it? Is it our responsibility? I have no idea, and maybe (obviously) I’m too much of a coward to say what I really think.

This museum is a celebration of victory, a celebration of stopping tyranny, a celebration of those men and women who made it happen; it is not a celebration of war.

We stopped a madman in Europe sixty-four years ago. I mean ..... we really did it. We, and the allies who helped us, should celebrate that victory everyday. Visit the National WW II Museum and, more important, take your children. I heard (unconfirmed) that a recent survey in New Orleans showed that eighty percent of our twelve-year olds think that our enemy in WW II was Russia. American history, like it or not, involves war. And we owe it to those who fought for us, who fought for our freedom and for the conviction of our ideologies, to honor those memories with education, museums, and proud artistic historical images of American ingenuity and heroism, such as George Rodrigue’s Victory on Bayou St John.

I end with a quote from Historian Stephen Ambrose:

"The brave young men rode onto the beaches and into battle on Higgins Boats, built in New Orleans by Andrew Higgins, the man Eisenhower said, 'won the war for us.' Higgins was a patriot and a visionary capitalist, but he could not have built tens of thousands of ships in a few short years without a tremendous effort from his workers. In a scene repeated in cities all across the country, the people of New Orleans came together - black and white, old and young, men and women - to propel the war effort. Like their soldiers, they worked hard and made sacrifices because they all believed in the righteousness of their cause. They believed that, as a popular saying of the times had it, 'we're all in this together'."

Wendy

Blue Dog: The Ghost of Tiffany, 1990-1992

In 1989 artist George Rodrigue, an investor, and that investor’s agent-brother opened The Rodrigue Gallery of New Orleans just behind St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter. In those first months the gallery exhibited George’s Cajun paintings, mostly large genre works featuring his friends and family as models. However, as I mentioned in a previous blog (Blue Dog: In the Beginning, 1984-1989), the loup-garou recently entered his paintings, and he returned from a 1989 Los Angeles exhibition of his work mulling over a new subject.

As Super Bowl XXIV (held in New Orleans) approached in January 1990, George wondered how he would get people through the door of his gallery. All too often he watched the tourists on Royal Street walk by without giving the window a glance. In its first six months the gallery had sold one painting (the first week it opened, as it happens), and George considered the possibility that no one but him could sell his work. Maybe a New Orleans gallery was not a good idea.

Before giving up, he painted Blue Dogs. And the week before the Super Bowl, he filled the windows and much of the gallery with them. His investor, his agent, his friends, indeed everyone he knew, told him he was crazy. No one liked them.

These early Blue Dogs were little changed from their Loup-garou predecessors. The paintings all had Louisiana landscapes in the background. The dog’s color was blue-grey, and it had discernible fur. Its texture was rough and frayed at the edges, and in many ways it was still a wolf. The only significant change was in the eyes. They still were dog-eyes, oval and somewhat realistic, but now, instead of red the eyes were yellow. (below: Midnight Moon, 1990, 30x24; Devil Dog, 1990, 20x24; On My Master's Grave, 1990, 24x20)

Remember, the Blue Dog was not some overnight epiphany. Its metamorphosis was slow (and on-going, for that matter), and the paintings are so well-defined by particular periods of development, that there are many of us that could look at a collection of one hundred Blue Dog paintings from 1984 to 2009 and easily place them in chronological order.

Despite the objections around him, George painted these haunting works and filled his gallery with them. He saw a change immediately. The Cajun paintings required lengthy explanations. For years he sold his paintings on the road, traveling to meet his collectors and explaining his work over long dinners and extensive conversation. He counted on introductions from his friends at restaurants and other businesses, and once he had that initial contact, he convinced people to take a harder look. He convinced them that his paintings were different and worth the hefty price tag.

But with the Blue Dog paintings, people asked questions as they walked into the gallery. Whether they loved it or hated it, they still were curious, and this gave the Rodrigue Gallery staff an opening to discuss the work with strangers.

That Super Bowl weekend in 1990, George painted in the gallery (as I recall, the only time he ever did so in New Orleans). He watched as people approached the window and stopped dead in their tracks. His work never had this kind of shock-quality before, and he found it exciting and inspiring. It was completely new --- an absolute blast.

What’s with this Blue Dog? If I could count how many times I heard that question. People poured in the gallery asking it. And we (the sales staff) couldn’t define it! We stumbled over explanations of werewolves and ghost dogs and Tiffany. We needed help from the artist, and yet he too was stumped. He had created a phenomenon he could not explain.

Furthermore, that Super Bowl weekend NBC News, People Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and countless other news agencies photographed and filmed the Rodrigue Gallery window and interviewed George Rodrigue. He began to talk about the paintings without mentioning their Cajun background (both the literal canvas landscape background, as well as the hundreds of Cajun paintings before them). He found himself talking more about the painting’s model, Tiffany, a ghost that died ten years before. (For more on Tiffany,