How did a cocker spaniel/terrier mix with wild blue hair and soulful golden eyes capture not just the hearts of art lovers, but ordinary people all over the world?
It’s just one of many questions answered in the new documentary “Blue: The Life and Art of George Rodrigue” making its North American debut at the upcoming New Orleans Film Festival.
While the “Blue Dog” paintings put the career of artist George Rodrigue into high gear, there was a whole body of work that predated those paintings, before his curious canine.
His early life, which the documentary highlights, gives the viewer a deeper understanding of who Rodrigue was and what made him tick. There was a lot of thought behind Rodrigue’s paintbrush, and it was those intricacies that propelled WLAE to develop this film project.
The final interview with Rodrigue
“We went back to our archives and realized we had the last known interview with George Rodrigue before his passing in December of 2013,” explained Jim Dotson, general manager of 6th Street Studios and WLAE, the producers.
“As we looked at the footage, we thought that this interview would serve as the foundation of a great documentary on his life and art.”
Producer Trisha Johnson Reece and writer/director Sean O’Malley were given unrestricted access to Rodrigue’s sons, Jacques and Andre, and his widow, Wendy, who filled in the blanks outside of his public persona.
For director O’Malley, a native New Orleanian, the project was a labor of love.
“My mom’s family is Cajun, and George’s paintings are love letters to the Cajun culture,” O’Malley said. “I went into his gallery in the French Quarter so often because I loved the ‘Blue Dogs’, but I never investigated who George was.
“Now that I’ve done this film, I know his art’s significance. It’s been said that he didn’t just paint what Louisiana looks like, he painted what it feels like.”
‘We Stand Together,’ a 2005 sculpture by
George Rodrigue, is part of the Besthoff Sculpture Garden.
Rodrigue’s artistic journey
Rodrigue grew up in the small Cajun town of New Iberia. In the third grade, he contracted polio and temporarily lost the use of his legs.
While he was bedridden, his mother bought him a paint-by-numbers set, but he didn’t like the rigidity of the confined lines, so he painted on the back side. It was the beginning of an artistic journey.
Rodrigue eventually enrolled at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and then was accepted at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. Although he’d never been west of Texas, he packed up and moved to California. But, after his father died, he returned to Louisiana and decided to show a dying Cajun culture in his paintings.
An Andy Warhol exhibit he saw in the late ’60s made an impact on him, and Rodrigue’s Evangeline oaks became his own Campbell’s soup can, a signature of his landscape period.
Image provided by the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts – “Aioli Dinner” is a 1971 painting by George Rodrigue.
Rodrigue’s early works were not embraced by critics or museum curators. In fact, a showing of his landscapes exhibited at a Louisiana state museum prompted a newspaper reporter to write that his paintings were depressing and shadowy, and that perhaps the artist took his paintings and himself too seriously. When he later had an exhibit in Baton Rouge, everyone came to see what the critics called “ugly.” It sold out, and he was on his way.
In the late ’80s, Rodrigue was commissioned to do a portrait of President Ronald Reagan. He didn’t like the horse Reagan was on, so he substituted Gene Autry’s horse. His work was becoming iconic.
But, when he decided to insert his own dog, Tiffany, into a painting, and turn her blue to reflect the sky’s light, it was the beginning of a theme that would overshadow anything he’d done previously. Suddenly celebrities were popping up alongside the “Blue Dog”, from Whoopi Goldberg to Drew Brees, and even one with a blue-faced Donald Trump.
Bringing Rodrigue into focus
The documentary is peppered with a who’s who of Louisiana legends whose insights and observations about Rodrigue really bring the artist into focus. From Emeril Lagasse to politico James Carville, reporter Clancy Dubos who first interviewed Rodrigue in 1980 for The Times-Picayune, and later became a dear friend, to former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial.
“We included Morial because we really wanted to tell the story of arts and culture which he promoted in the 1990s while he was mayor of New Orleans,” said O’Malley. “It was the era when Emeril, Paul Prudhomme, the Nevilles and the Marsalis brothers were rising to international prominence. And, as it turns out, Morial was eager to discuss just how George Rodrigue was a part of that movement.”
Ever the man with the big heart, Rodrigue sold his paintings and donated millions to his beloved city of New Orleans for its recovery in the wake of massive flooding following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Rodrigue was incredibly prolific and left behind a large body of work.
Jacques Rodrigues leads seventh graders from Our Lady of Fatima on a tour of his father’s artwork that is currently displayed at the Hilliard Museum of Art on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, in Lafayette. Jacques Rodrigue is the Executive Director of the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts.
One of his most famous works, 1971’s “The Aioli Dinner,” his first painting with people, is part of the permanent collection at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
Much of his prized art is owned by his sons, worldwide collectors and his widow, Wendy.
It was his wife that he went to for massages when he assumed his shoulder pains were due to his overzealous painting, but an image revealed that tumors in his shoulders had spread from his lungs. The oil paints and varnish he used on his precious paintings contained carcinogenic chemicals, which he inhaled for years in the attic of his home where he painted.
The cancer would take his life, but not before his last heartbreaking painting would expose his deepest feelings about love and his life’s end, as the “Blue Dog” became Rodrigue, immortalized forever on canvas.
“Blue: The Life and Art of George Rodrigue” will debut at The New Orleans Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 21 at the Orpheum Theater. The airdate on WLAE is 7 p.m. Dec. 8. It will air later in December, statewide, on WLPB.
