Picture of George Rodrigue Selling Art on Sidewalk Blue Dog Man Sells on Street

George Rodrigue, Painter of Blueish Dog, Dies at 69

• December. 18, 2013

George Rodrigue's career equally an creative person started with dark and lush landscapes of his native Louisiana bayou. But it shifted abruptly, and profitably, when he began a series of portraits of a single subject: a melancholy mutt that came to be known equally Blue Dog.

Mr. Rodrigue, who died on Dec. 14 in Houston at 69, set out to certificate and celebrate Cajun culture with works similar "The Aioli Dinner" (1971), which depicts traditional gatherings on the lawns of plantations.

He won recognition in France and Italy. He painted portraits of famous people, including the celebrity chef Paul Prudhomme — who helped popularize Cajun food and culture in the 1970s — also every bit Walker Percy, Huey Long, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Among his many commissions was a asking in 1984 that he do the artwork for a drove of Cajun ghost stories, including a painting of a ghost canis familiaris, or werewolf, known in his office of the world as the loup-garou.

Mr. Rodrigue (pronounced rod-REEG) found his model in his studio: a photograph of his domestic dog, Tiffany, who had died. She was black and white in reality only became blue in his imagination, with yellow eyes. She was also a she, merely she could become a he — or, for that affair, whatsoever else a viewer was prepared to see.

"The yellow eyes are actually the soul of the dog," Mr. Rodrigue told The New York Times in 1998. "He has this piercing stare. People say the dog keeps talking to them with the eyes, ever proverb something different."

He added: "People who have seen a Blueish Dog painting always remember it. They are actually almost life, about mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And y'all're looking at him, looking for some answers, 'Why are we here?,' and he'southward just looking back at you, wondering the same. The canis familiaris doesn't know. You lot tin meet this longing in his eyes, this longing for beloved, answers."

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Credit... Claudia B. Laws/The Daily Advertiser, via Associated Press

Past the early 1990s, Mr. Rodrigue was painting merely Blue Domestic dog.

"I dropped all the Cajun influence," he said in an interview with the New Orleans public telly station WLAE.

Mr. Rodrigue was born in New Iberia in southern Louisiana on March xiii, 1944, the but child of George and Marie Rodrigue. His begetter was a bricklayer. He began learning to draw and paint later on he was found to accept polio at historic period eight and spent several months in bed. He studied art at the University of Southwest Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) in the mid-1960s and attended the Fine art Centre College of Design (then in Los Angeles; now in Pasadena) from 1965 to 1967.

He returned to Louisiana in 1968. In 1976, he published his first book, "The Cajuns of George Rodrigue."

He died of cancer, his family said. Survivors include his wife, Wendy, and 2 sons, Jacques and Andre.

Mr. Rodrigue boasted that information technology was not uncommon for his Blueish Dog paintings to sell for $25,000. Some were rumored to take sold for 10 times that.

He painted Bluish Dogs with presidents, with naked women in imitation French scenes, on the lawn with his Aioli dining club party, inside a soup tin can, in ads for Absolut Vodka and next to Marilyn Monroe (returning jabs, perhaps, at those who dismissed him every bit a Pop Art opportunist). Critics were not ever impressed, but he said he did not care.

In later years Mr. Rodrigue painted other subjects, but he did not abandon Blue Dog. He said he painted in part for the people who walked by his studio on Regal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

"You have to do something that really attracts the attention," he said in the WLAE interview. "I didn't offset out doing that, but that's to fight for that audition. It's great. Information technology's really great because information technology's a cross-section of the whole state here that walks down Royal Street, and the world."

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/arts/design/george-rodrigue-artist-who-painted-blue-dog-dies-at-69.html