For Rodrigue lovers, a new book is part memoir, part art history text
Based on the legend of the rougarou (essentially, the Cajun werewolf), Louisiana artist George Rodrigue’s pop art-inspired Blue Dog paintings have been a ubiquitous presence in the Southern art scene since the 1990s and have made their creator a wealthy man. But as Rodrigue’s wife, Wendy Wolfe Rodrigue, describes in her new memoir The Other Side of the Painting, that prominence has brought plenty of criticism—in the form of insults both obvious: “My eight-year-old kid could paint that!” and disguised: “Rodrigue is a brilliant businessman, a marketing genius!”
Wendy Rodrigue is having none of it, and her book extends the description much further. Through a series of sharply written, highly readable anecdotes adapted from her popular blog Musings of an Artist’s Wife, Wendy paints a fuller portrait of the man behind the Blue Dog, revealing George Rodrigue’s refined aesthetic sensibility and encyclopedic artistic knowledge from the intimate perspective that only a spouse can provide.
George Rodrigue pushed Wendy to launch her blog in 2009, and the result has been a series of engaging posts such as “Treating your painting like a jewel” and “It’s like I’m gonna get a stick stuck in my eye, and I can’t wait to get it ‘cause it’s good for me,” which delves into the spirited, arts-focused debates that are a feature of the couple’s ongoing exploration of life-as-revealed-through-art. Wendy reorganized both posts into chapters in her memoir, revisiting past subjects with a matured viewpoint.
The content recounts the history and origins of the Blue Dog paintings, and reveals the stories and life experiences contained within Rodrigue’s other bodies of work. Some of the most illuminating passages, though, are Wendy’s accounts of the couple’s conversations while viewing great works by the masters of Western art: the Monets, Picassos, and Kandinskys. In chapters like “Rodrigue on Monet,” in which Wendy captures her husband’s ability to reach deeper into works like Monet’s Water Lilies using his artist’s eye to grasp the full extent of the artist’s achievement and interpret it for his wife, The Other Side of the Painting becomes as much an art history textbook as a memoir. Wendy learns from George; we learn from Wendy: The circle is complete.
The Other Side of the Painting: Published by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. 460 pages, $24.95 hardcover.
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