Beach Ball Bingo

Although George Rodrigue is best known for his oak tree–accented depictions of the Louisiana landscape, throughout his career he drew inspiration for his work from other places with different landscapes. As a child, Rodrigue visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast with his parents; as an art student in California during the 1960s, he traveled along the Pacific coast; and he later spent time on the Florida Panhandle and in Hawaii. These experiences inspired a small but vibrant group of coastal scenes featuring his iconic Blue Dog—originally derived from Cajun loup-garou folklore and first appearing in the 1980s—which Rodrigue relocated from bayou settings into new, often leisure-filled environments. In 2012, Rodrigue painted Beach Ball Bingo (pictured in his home in New Orleans and in progress on his easel), a playful shore scene featuring two of his signature Blue Dogs standing in the sand amongst three colorful beach balls. The composition’s bold, flat colors and simplified forms reflect the artist’s distinctive blend of Bayou Surrealist roots and Pop-art sensibility; the paired dogs add a note of companionship unusual in a series more often centered on a solitary figure. The painting’s background is rendered in subtly shifting shades of blue that distinguish sky from water. Similarly, Rodrigue uses more saturated colors to paint the curving strips of sand closest to the shoreline, indicating where water has washed ashore and receded. In the same way that he set out to capture what made Louisiana unique in his early landscape paintings, Rodrigue captured the subtle details that make coastal landscapes special in Beach Ball Bingo. Beach Ball Bingo serves as a precursor to the much-loved Sit in Your Own Chair (2013) silkscreen, which depicts a row of brightly colored Adirondack beach chairs on the sand—each paired with its own matching Blue Dog—further celebrating Rodrigue’s nostalgic memories of family outings along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in Florida. Over a decade earlier, works such as the popular Hawaiian Blues (1998–99), commissioned by Neiman Marcus for the opening of their Honolulu store and featuring the Blue Dog with a butterfly lei against palm-fringed shores, demonstrated how Hawaii in particular expanded his coastal vocabulary. In 2017, the painting was included in the exhibition Rodrigue: American Beach at the artist’s former gallery in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. The show celebrated Rodrigue’s lifelong affection for sun, sand, and surf, rooted in personal memories of childhood beach visits (he once recalled envying friends with beach houses while staying in motels). And now Beach Ball Bingo is available as an estate-stamped lithograph. These hand-pulled stone lithographs were produced in France by a team of skilled artisans specializing in this traditional printmaking process. Each artisan focuses on a specific element of the printmaking process, such as color separation, stone etching, and print pulling. The resulting image does an impressive job of capturing the painterly detail and retaining the visual spirit of the original painting. Sold unframed. Price and availability subject to change without notice. All prints sold directly by the Rodrigue Estate are also accompanied by a certificate of authenticity indicating the number of the print purchased from the estate.