A Blue Dog Is This Man’s Best Friend

It was a cold and starry night when Blue Dog Man arrived in Pasadena, sporting his one-of-a-kind Blue Dog Rolex watch, his Blue Dog muse and wife, Wendy--and a pitching arm primed for action. He’d been signing Blue Dog books in La Jolla all afternoon.

The crowd at Vroman’s Museum Shop was big for such a frosty night, but nothing like the throngs of 1,000 fans that showed up last month in Dallas and Atlanta, eager to get artist George Rodrigue’s autograph on his newest picture book, “Blue Dog in Love.”

Rodrigue is a crowd-pleaser. A guy who struggled for years, sold paintings from the trunk of his car, who ignored the advice of friends and guffaws of critics and followed his heart when it seemed to be leading nowhere. In mid-career, he painted one blue dog. Then dozens. Then hundreds and thousands. Almost all identical, but not exactly. The dog has become America’s newest pooch pop icon--a ragged-ear pup with beseeching yellow eyes, whose creator has survived poverty, ridicule and self-doubt to become a howling success. Most who showed up wanted mainly to meet the artist and buy affordable versions in book form of his new work. The book, his eighth, is $35. Original canvases and silk screens of the work reproduced therein can sell for $250,000 or more.

The artist signs and schmoozes with folks like art director Bill Ford, of West Los Angeles, who’s bought 10 books and wants them all signed differently. And with Pasadena attorney Rick Santwier, who says he has an original Blue Dog artwork in his office. And attorney Marci Mandel, of Culver City, who’s bought six books as Christmas presents. Jacob Sonnenberg, 13, of Arcadia, identifies himself as a “collector” and presents $113 worth of Blue Dog merchandise purchased on this evening. (In addition to the dog books, which sell for up to $50, there are note cards and engagement calendars.)

Blue Dog is big business. Rodrigue is relatively rich, he tells the bundled-up group, now settled on bridge chairs to hear him say a few words. But the money, the books and other assorted commercial items are not what the dog or its creator are all about, he says.

The books, in fact, are a world apart from his art. They are an accidental outgrowth of it, originally intended for collectors of his Blue Dog paintings. They were so successful, however, that they turned into a minor industry. (He does not say that the first printing for “Blue Dog in Love” is 100,000 copies, according to publisher Stewart, Tabori & Chang, whereas the usual first printing for such art books is about 5,000 copies. Nor does he mention that “Blue Dog Man,” an earlier book, has sold more than 250,000 so far.)

And, yes, his Blue Dog canvases and silk screens are serious art--despite the critics who have either ignored or belittled the canine. Some have even accused him of stenciling the same dog over and over again--or copying it and simply changing the backgrounds.

Ridiculous, says Rodrigue. He paints it fresh each time, straight from out of his head, without copying or measuring or even glancing at Blue Dogs from before. And so the dog has evolved, has changed subtly, has grown along with its creator, he says. “If you look in my galleries (he owns one in New Orleans and one in Carmel) and see all the Blue Dogs together, you will see that each is different from the rest.”

Rodrigue’s soft, slurred drawl reeks of the mossy Louisiana bayou where he was born. He is Cajun, he says. And when he grew up, that was not considered a good thing to be. “Cajun meant you were ignorant and poor.”

The only child of a bricklayer and a mother who sold baubles, he says “my own Mama, who is now 92, never called herself Cajun. She identified herself as French and still does to this day.”

Rodrigue (pronounced Rodreeg) is interrupted by audience members asking questions fawning and polite. But the beefy 6-footer, whose jeans and leather jacket seem about to be outgrown--persists in telling the crowd what he wants them to know.

He “failed” at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and dropped out. He attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he learned he had talent but not how to use it. He dropped out again. He went home to New Iberia, La., and started painting the dank landscapes, the ancient oak trees and the Cajun people with whom he had grown up--dark, haunted backgrounds with white-lit figures in front. He became respected, a success in his special world, he says. He sold “every Cajun painting I ever painted during the entire 25 years.”

His first Blue Dog was painted in 1984, as an illustration for a book. He could not get the dog out of his head, he says. “It was new, fresh, liberating. It eliminated the horizon line, the dark colors, the oak trees, everything I had concentrated on for 25 years. It freed me of all my inhibitions, like a breath of fresh air.” He felt compelled to paint Blue Dog again and again. “Friends said I was nuts. How could I give up a good career painting Cajuns and devote myself to a dog?” When he opened an art gallery in New Orleans, he decided to make a splash. “I put 50 big Blue Dogs in the window and that changed my life.” A German film crew, in town for a documentary on chef Paul Prud’homme, saw the display and was entranced by the blue canine. They decided to do a documentary on Rodrigue, too.

Suddenly, he became Blue Dog Man.

Rodrigue, 58, gestures toward his brilliantly blond and shapely wife, Wendy, 33. She is standing off to the side, smiling, like a magician’s assistant waiting to be sawed in half. The two have been married for five years, live in Carmel, and he has painted her, so far, about 25 times. It is her narration of how they met and fell in love that accompanies the new artwork in “Blue Dog in Love.”

(Rodrigue’s 27-year marriage to Veronica Hidalgo Rodrigue ended in 1993. She claimed Blue Dog as part of community property, leading to an eight-year legal wrangle settled out of court last week.)

Rodrigue does not mention to the crowd that in 1977, his first book, “The Cajuns of George Rodrigue,” with 98 color reproductions of his early work, was selected by Roslynn Carter as the official U.S. State Department gift for visiting foreign heads of state. Nor does he say that the state of Louisiana has dedicated a museum to his Cajun work, in Lafayette. Nor that a family portrait painted for the first President Bush before Blue Dog was born now hangs in the senior Bush’s Texas home.

He doesn’t tell them that two Blue Dog paintings are in the White House with the current President Bush or that Blue Dog paintings are in the collections of Tom Brokaw, Whoopi Goldberg and Harry Connick Jr., to name a few celebrities who have taken the mongrel into their homes.

In a later interview, Rodrigue explains that he reserves information like that for people considering purchase of his paintings, who want to know whether they are worth the price.

Xerox recently paid him $7.5 million for use of one Blue Dog image in an ad campaign, since canceled due to the bad economy. Rodrigue, however, was paid in full. The artist estimates that he earns $10 million a year from sales of his paintings through the galleries and his Web site, an income augmented by sales of the books and other Blue Dog stuff. “Blue Dog is wildly popular,” he says. And he is wildly happy since he has been painting it. The dog has transcended himself. “He is no longer a dog but a graphic concept that can grow along with me. We are on a journey together. We don’t know where it will take us.”

As for the critics, “Who cares?” he says.

“When so many people accept and like something, you just have to wait for the critics to catch up.”