“I’m a survivor.” George Rodrigue, 2011
“USL offered to show my work,” says George Rodrigue, “because of the notoriety from my first show, held earlier that year at Christopher’s Antiques in New Iberia. I had painted full time less than a year at this point, and it all happened so fast that I mistakenly thought that fame and fortune were around the corner.”
“The director first told me that they book shows three years ahead, and that I was wasting my time in trying. But two months later he called and explained that the scheduled exhibition fell through. Did I still have seventy framed oak tree paintings available?
“This was my biggest break yet, because I might be reviewed in the newspaper by the Baton Rouge art critic. As the state capitol’s paper, The Morning Advocate was widely read and held tremendous influence across the state. I waited anxiously every week for an article about my show.”

“The total effect is repetitious and monotonous, with all of the scenes similar, the treatment never varying… His paintings are flat and drab rather than teeming with life. His bayou country is a shadowy, depressing place with none of the life and color that pulses there. Even his few portraits are somber affairs, and his people give the impression that life is hard and serious business. One feels that the artist takes Acadiana much too seriously, and perhaps himself as well.”
“He shows some competence as a painter, particularly in his use of light…but he repeats the same theme and technique in virtually every painting. The ability is there, plus the obvious dedication to his subject, and he may well develop into a first class painter…”
“Rodrigue’s paintings are exciting because they are innovative. They appeal to the intellect as well as to the imagination. Moreover, he has succeeded in capturing the very essence of Southwest Louisiana, its land and its people. In his paintings he reveals to us not what Acadiana looks like but what it is.” – Camilla Hunt Cole for Art in America, 1974
“George Rodrigue’s vision, abstract and severely linear in its inception, takes form first as a line-drawing, then through an obsession with major and basic forms, developing into an elemental landscape statement, austere and sober, limited in color but rich in range of hues, validly restrictive to the nature of the landscape of Lafayette parish and surrounding areas in South Louisiana and Southeast Texas. Human and architectural features emerge in terms of the dusky world of pervasive subtropical shade where white is exotic and sky minimal.” – Claude L. Kennard, Director of the Beaumont Art Museum, 1971
“… a romantic who loves the countryside where he grew up; he paints the bayous, the simple Acadian cabins and the moss-hung oaks with the love of the true native. His landscapes are not executed in a style he picked up from the past, but in a manner which has something of Louisiana Art Nouveau, something of the direct conceptions of William Aiken Walker, but more of Rodrigue himself.”

“My style,” George says, “was outdated and out of touch with contemporary directors that viewed their shows as a reflection of what was going on in New York.”
“At this time, artists should try to produce something from themselves, or from their area – that’s where art is headed today. All America really has left in art is what one feels.”
“Today, anything new is accepted as art. Anything that hasn’t been done before. But after going through pop art, op art, abstracts – what’s left that’s new? Not much. That’s one reason why things have been slow in the art world for the last eight-or-so years.”