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LSU Football: A Personal History
As LSU faces Alabama this weekend, a bookworm, in spite of herself, embraces a sports tradition-I attended a small college, Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. In the mid-1980s we had maybe two...
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Hiding From the Blues
Recently I challenged George Rodrigue: Pretend I’m a stranger and answer some questions.“Do you ever get the Blues?”“No, I really don’t, at least not on my own,” he said. “But I do catch the Blues...
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Victory on Bayou St. John
“The brave young men rode onto the beaches and into battle on Higgins Boats, built in New Orleans by Andrew Higgins, the man Eisenhower said, ‘won the war for us.'” —Stephen AmbroseYet these two...
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Blue Wendy
This weekend George Rodrigue and I attended an event where the religious leader prayed for and encouraged our suffering. We left watching carefully, unprepared at a gala for this powerful lesson, for...
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The Family Table
In 1950 George Rodrigue drew and colored a turkey for his parents. On the back he wrote in a surprisingly elegant child’s script:For Mother and Dad on Thanksgiving:1. Visits to chapel. 92....
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The Working Artist
Note: Throughout this post I sprinkled images by Louisiana artists. Some I interviewed and some not, but all are included in the book The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana.* As I wrote, I...
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George Rodrigue: Painting Louisiana
Note: Based on an essay scheduled for publication in an upcoming book* celebrating Louisiana’s bicentennial, published in April 2012 by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, this blog version...
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Happy Christmas
So this is ChristmasAnd what have you doneAnother year overAnd a new one just begun*I wandered through college with a guilt complex. Like many naïve students, inspired by a voting voice and new...
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Farewell to Exhibitions; Welcome to Painting
George Rodrigue and I spent much of the past eighteen months on the road visiting museums and communities for exhibitions, lectures, and education events coordinated by the George Rodrigue Foundation...
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Swamp Dogs: A Series on Metal
More than a year in the making, George Rodrigue’s Swamp Dogs combine print, photography and varnish on large sheets of metal, resulting in a unique perspective of the Louisiana landscape.Beyond...
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Risky Business
"It is a dangerous business going out your front door."*This morning I watched from my desk in Carmel Valley, California as a great-horned owl took a bath. It glanced at me, assessed the danger, and...
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Four for Mardi Gras
It’s impossible to live in the Gulf South and ignore Mardi Gras. It spreads from Galveston to the Florida Panhandle, affecting our judgment, so that ‘normal’ becomes beads, wigs, costumes and masks....
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Painting Like a Child... Again
“Creating art in a childlike manner means to be simple and direct, resulting in immediate imagery.” –George RodrigueSince founding the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts (GRFA) in 2009, George...
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MUSE-ings from a Mardi Gras Float
If ever there was a reason for lasik…, I thought to myself as I struggled with my glasses, barely touching my nose over enormous feathered hot pink eyelashes and a mandatory mask, all negotiated around...
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All Hail King George
George Rodrigue makes a great King. I hear it every year as we attend the Washington D.C. Mardi Gras, where he ruled in 1994 and still commands regal respect.(pictured, It’s Good to be the King, 1994,...
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The Mamou Riding Academy: Fact or Fiction
“One summer a German mule trader struggled to sell his last white mule. A farmer finally bought it for his daughter, and the daughter liked it so much that her friends each wanted one. In the end,...
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Our Anniversary
Fifteen years ago today, George Rodrigue and I married beneath a Louisiana live oak, the same Evangeline-style tree he’s painted for years, in Rip Van Winkle Gardens at Jefferson Island, Louisiana. It...
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Moonstruck, Madame Butterfly and the Mudlark
“Bring me the big knife; I’m gonna cut my throat!”*Several nights ago, as we walked in a chilly, blowing drizzle across the street from the Metropolitan Opera, I stopped, even as the crosswalk sign...
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The Human in the Painting
“She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.” –Cecil Vyse, A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, 1908Certain paintings,...
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Washington Blue Dog (and the Blue Dog Democrats)
In 1992 George Rodrigue painted Washington Blue Dog, a tribute to the United States of America’s capitol, Washington, DC. The painting is one of his most famous. Its prints hang in the offices of...
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