I have loved a great many dogs in my lifetime, but only one of them is eight feet tall, electric blue, and currently holding court along a stretch of Route 66 in Oklahoma like he was born to it. Then again, if you came up in South Louisiana the way I did, you learned a long time ago that the Blue Dog does not ask permission. He simply shows up — yellow eyes wide, ears at attention — wherever he pleases, and you are somehow always glad to see him.
This time, he has wandered about as far from the bayou as a Cajun werewolf can get. As part of the Route 66 Centennial Celebration, an 8-foot George Rodrigue Blue Dog sculpture now greets travelers on historic Route 66 near Oklahoma City. And I have to tell you — as a Louisiana girl who has been quietly saving up for a Blue Dog of my own for the better part of two decades — watching our most famous pup greet drivers on the Mother Road’s 100th birthday made me grin from ear to ear.
A full-circle journey on the Mother Road
Long before the Blue Dog was an icon, George Rodrigue was just a young artist from New Iberia with big dreams and a 1962 Corvair. In that little car, he drove himself clear across the country to art school in Los Angeles, and much of that journey unspooled along Route 66.
Rodrigue talked for years about that drive, about how the sheer visual intensity of all that open American road got into his bones and shaped the way he painted light and landscape for the rest of his life. So when I say the Blue Dog has come home to Route 66, I mean it almost literally. The road that helped make the artist is now hosting the creature that made him famous.
Born under the live oaks: the Blue Dog’s Louisiana DNA
For the uninitiated, the Blue Dog is not a logo, a mascot, or (Rodrigue would want me to be very clear about this) a cartoon. He was downright adamant that the Blue Dog is a serious work of art, and he spent ten years figuring out how to translate that strong, flat, painted shape into three dimensions without losing one ounce of its soul. “Public art is sculpture,” he said, and he meant it as a standard, not a slogan…