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George Rodrigue American/Louisiana, 1944-2013 "Boudreaux's Cabin in Belle Terre" oil on linen 1995, signed lower left, inscribed "#95131" en verso, artist stamp and inscribed "95PT008580" on stretcher, label with title on reverse of frame, original frame. Provenance: Rodrigue Studio, New Orleans, LA, Oct. 3, 1998. Note: "When I first decided to paint Cajun landscapes, I knew that light would play a unique role in my work. In Louisiana, the light is always distant, obscured by a low sky and the moss-draped branches of the oak trees. In my recent paintings, however, I've manipulated my old ‘rules' in order to reflect new moods and new environments. My Louisiana is not dark these days. Indeed, it is full of color and light." - George Rodrigue As a young artist returning home to Louisiana from art school at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1967, George Rodrigue visited the New Orleans Museum of Art to study those who had succeeded as artists before him, both those of the Hudson River School and those who had worked closer to home in the style of the Barbizon School such as Richard Clague, William Henry Buck and Joseph Meeker. To Rodrigue, none of these artists captured the look or spirit of his Louisiana, so he determined to forge a new path in one of the most traditional genres of painting - landscape. With his recent studies in traditional painting techniques, abstract expressionism, pop art and hard edge painting in mind, he carefully considered his approach. Rodrigue raised the horizon line, cropped the oak trees at the top so the light shone from underneath the branches and hanging moss and defined the tree's distinctive shape with hard edges. In doing so, Rodrigue created his own graphic visual interpretation of Louisiana that he would continue to explore and refine over the next forty years. By the mid-1990s, George Rodrigue was fully engaged with his famous Blue Dog series, exploring new meanings within his work. While harkening to the visual vocabulary of his Cajun series and earlier loup-garou paintings in many ways, the Blue Dog paintings from this period inspired the artist to expand his experimentation with color, shape, and texture. Contrary to popular belief, Rodrigue never abandoned his established Cajun themes and oak trees. This lifetime subject for the artist usually followed the same pattern no matter the year, and Rodrigue continued to paint the oak tree even during the height of his Blue Dog series, as seen in the work offered here. Painted in oil in 1995, "Boudreaux's Cabin in Belle Terre" is a familiar tableau for the artist, but one re-imagined through color. In art school, Rodrigue's professors described him as a colorist, an ironic title when one considers his dark early oaks from the 1970s. Yet, even in his darkest canvases, Rodrigue's color palette is multi-faceted. With his change from oil to acrylic paint in the early 1990s, the artist made his love for color even more obvious, and over the years, his canvases began to grow brighter and brighter. Blue and its spiritual qualities in particular would come to define him as an artist, however his strong background in design was clear from his earliest utilization of shape and color to create timeless and striking scenes. Ref.: Rodrigue, George. Blue Dog Man. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1999, p. 90.