Welcome to the official You Tube site of Louisiana artist George Rodrigue. Click on videos to learn more about the artist, see painting demonstrations, lectures and much more!

George Rodrigue
George Rodrigue (b. 1944) was born and raised in New Iberia, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country. For forty years, his work has remained rooted in the familiar milieu of home.

During the mid-1960s Rodrigue attended the Art Center Colege of Design in Los Angeles, where the graduate school 's curriculum provided him a nuts-and-bolts foundation in drawing and painting. Outside of art school, L.A. was full of Pop and Abstract influences, and it was an exciting time for a young artist in America. However, much like today, critical success depended on one's New York visibility. Nevertheless, Rodrigue returned to Louisiana. He would use its symbols not only to capture the essense of his personal world, but also to express his spiritual and cultural ideas as they pertained to Louisiana, to the South, and to America. Rodrigue decided that he would not be a Louisiana artist in New York City; instead he would return home with his new knowledge and give meaning to a new phrase: Cajun Artist.

The Blue Dog
It was a myth, the loup-garou, which inspired another Rodrigue series, the Blue Dog. Painted for a book of Cajun ghost stories called Bayou (Inkwell, 1984), this werewolf-type dog was an already familiar legend for Rodrigue, who heard the story often as a boy. With no image for the loup-garou, the artist searched his vast photo files for a suitable shape. He found this in photos of his studio dog Tiffany who had died several years before. Rodrigue used her stance and manipulated her shape to meet his needs for the painting. Under a blue night sky he painted the image a pale grey-blue and gave it red eyes. He liked what he saw and added this image to his pictorial list of favorite Cajun legends, painting it in cemetery and bayou scenes intermittently over the next five or six years. He switched the dog's eyes to yellow, creating a friendlier image, and he soon realized that the Blue Dog could take him anywhere on the canvas — even out of Cajun country. He explored his earlier Pop and abstract interests in a more obvious way, breaking his canvas into strong shapes just as he always had with the oak trees and Cajuns, with the addition of bold blocks of color and a new signature-type shape in the mix. The dog became bluer and the paintings more abstract, reflecting Rodrigue's current feelings about life, once again using an image that he knows and loves best. Today Rodrigue describes himself as an abstract artist who happens to paint things we recognize. Oftentimes the actual subjects within his paintings are secondary to his focus on shape, design and color.

Rodrigue Studio, featuring the art of Louisiana artist George Rodrigue, has gallery locations in New Orleans, LA, Lafayette, LA, Carmel, CA and Aspen, CO.