By Jean West Rudnicki
YOU CAN'T KEEP A GOOD CITY DOWN. NEW ORLEANS IS PROOF OF THAT AS THEY STRUGGLE TO REBUILD, REOPEN AND RISE AGAIN. ARTIST GEORGE RODRIGUE AND HIS FAMOUS BLUE DOG ARE HELPING TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN.
It is often said you can tell a lot about a man by his dog. Take Louisiana artist George Rodrigue and Blue Dog. Katrina’s wake had barely settled when the pop art pooch sprang into action helping raise funds for disasterridden New Orleans. In three days, prints of the blue-hued canine raised over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars – all delivered directly to the local chapter of the Red Cross. Today, two years after the storm, the Blue Dog Relief Fund has channeled more than one million dollars in assistance to the flood-ravaged city helping the community, its arts and artists – and it keeps on growing.
Born and raised in New Iberia, Louisiana, Rodrigue calls New Orleans home. He opted to come back to the state after studying graphic arts in Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. Today he is an acclaimed artist with a long list of accomplishments and commissioned works owned by presidents, vice presidents, and other heads of state, along with many jazz greats. Most of his art is deeply rooted in the legends and landscape of southern Louisiana featuring huge oaks, moonlit cemeteries, Cajun family gatherings and the beautiful Jolie Blonde of Cajun lore. Outside of Louisiana, though, he is best known for Blue Dog – there is even a gallery in Tokyo.
Blue Dog is – most often – blue, with piercing yellow eyes and a captivating stare that is both haunting and endearing, and rightly so. The dog’s heritage is a curious mix that includes an eerie Cajun werewolf – loup-garou; a pint-sized devoted family pet, Tiffany; plus a little bit (or a lot) of the artist himself. Blue Dog has the uncanny knack of popping up anywhere, and virtually everywhere – atop a tomb in a moon-filled cemetery, on the White House lawn, front and center on a motorcycle, amidst cacti of the desert southwest, even on the face of a dollar bill.
Among those counted as Blue Dog fans are the rich and famous, Hollywood stars, presidents and presidential wanna-bes, along with a huge crowd of the not rich, nor famous (self included).
Rodrigue is both amused and mystified by the Blue Dog phenomena. “I just sit back and watch,” he laughs. “It always…like, goes to another level. Every ten years it goes someplace else.” Recently he spotted a newspaper item noting that one of his early Blue Dog paintings sold for ninety-two thousand dollars at a Christie’s auction.
Blue Dog first appeared in 1984 in a book of ghost stories entitled, Bayou. Rodrigue was the book illustrator, and he needed a model for loup-garou, the werewolf of Cajun legend. Growing up, his mother often warned him of the beast’s penchant for misbehaving children. Ultimately he decided it fitting to use Tiffany, the scruffy, fiercely loyal spaniel terrier, which had passed away a couple of years earlier, as his model. Over the years it morphed from the blue-grey loup-garou to the bright-blue Blue Dog; had a series of books including Blue Dog, Blue Dog Man, and Blue Dog Christmas; and even did a short stint promoting Xerox Ink Jet printers and Absolut Vodka.
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