06/21/2026
George Rodrigue (1944-2013) was a supportive and loving father. As his sons grew older, he encouraged them to dream big and to pursue their passions. He expressed pride in their achievements and genuinely enjoyed their company and conversation.
Rodrigue painted his sons often as children. He structured his paintings from photographs, which he combined with his imagination to create a new environment on canvas. This process began with his earliest Cajun paintings, when he pulled clusters of figures from his mother’s photo album, locking them into a purposeful landscape of oak trees and bushes.
Their heads never touch the sky, creating the impression that the Cajun people, recalling their 1755 expulsion, were cut, as with scissors, out of Canada and pasted onto south Louisiana. Rodrigue’s compositions illustrate the Cajuns as inseparable from the land. In hundreds of paintings, he dresses his figures in white and, rather than in shadow, illuminates them beneath the trees.
In “Andre’ and Jacques” (1985), Rodrigue combines this concept with photographs of his children, ages ten and four, taken by the artist with this painting in mind. Locked into an imaginary landscape, the boys glow from the inside out, lit brightly beneath a massive oak by their father’s love as much as by their Cajun culture. On Rodrigue’s canvas, the boys are immortalized as children, as Cajuns, and as the subjects of Rodrigue’s honest and endearing interpretation of a father’s Louisiana summer, as he chooses the perfect watermelon with his sons.
