November 9, 2024: In the early 2000s, George Rodrigue began a series he called Bodies. Recalling his years at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, he noted that he was never the best draughtsman in class and that figure drawing was an ongoing struggle. This series, created late in his career, was something he really wanted to do, some thirty-five years after art school. It represents a mature artist with a great command of draughtsmanship and anatomy. Even after the fame of the Blue Dog Series, Rodrigue never lost his passion for capturing the human form and continuing to develop as an artist.
Prior to painting, Rodrigue photographed and sketched Wendy for two years, allowing the expression to unfold in its own time. He enjoyed the creative process, the moment, and the excitement of a major body of artwork shared, at least initially, just between husband and wife.
“These sessions were serious and, for me, sometimes uncomfortable, especially when I found myself, at George’s direction, perched on a tree branch or partially submerged in freezing water. Occasionally he sketched me from life, but more often, he used a tripod and camera. He later poured for hours over the photographs, many of which became drawings.” -Wendy
Rodrigue refused to explain the series, insisting that the work speak for itself. However, he worried about the effect on his wife of conservative attitudes, especially in their home state of Louisiana. He changed the original title from Wendy to Bodies and altered her face in some of the paintings. Nevertheless, the public backlash was challenging and fell, as Rodrigue anticipated, not on himself, but on her. To cope, George and Wendy connected the series to the Cajun legend, Jolie Blonde (also within this exhibition), and Wendy minimized her role in the series as merely a tool in the artistic process.
Technically, the artworks in Bodies serve as a demonstration of Rodrigue’s command of drawing and design. More importantly, however, these artworks were born out of his dedication to producing sincere and highly personal paintings. Although the artwork is public, the process of creating it was very private.
Rodrigue worked on Bodies for the rest of his life, completing a dozen paintings, hundreds of drawings, and thousands of photographs, all of which remained within his and Wendy’s private collection. For the market, he produced what he called “remastered digital prints,” blending scans of his paintings with digital manipulations of colors and shapes.
In this exhibition, a selection of the original paintings and drawings is on view for the first time since Bodies premiered at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2008 during a Rodrigue retrospective that broke the museum’s attendance records for a living artist or a contemporary show. Ironically, it was while standing within that exhibition that Rodrigue stated,
“I didn’t make them for others, Wendy. I made them for us.”
See “George Rodrigue: Painting for Myself” at the Longview Museum of Fine Arts (LMFA) in Longview, Texas. Organized by the George Rodrigue Life & Legacy Foundation, this traveling exhibition originated at the Museum of New Art in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and continues at LMFA through May 3, 2025.