In 1992, George Rodrigue painted The Blues Can Hide a Bad Apple, a work that features three blue dogs and one red dog. Rodrigue began painting red dogs in 1990 to depict the blue dog’s alter ego or sly side. As the painting’s title suggests, here, the red dog represents the blue dog’s bad side. With a yellow background, the painting is made up mostly of primary colors. The blue dogs on either end of The Blues Can Hide a Bad Apple are only partially visible. Rodrigue shows half of their faces, giving the viewer the sense that this line of dogs extends beyond what’s shown on the canvas.

Shortly after creating the painting, Rodrigue turned the work into a lithograph print. Using a four-color process, he typically used for his Cajun posters, Rodrigue produced an edition of prints of The Blues Can Hide a Bad Apple in the early 1990s. However, as Rodrigue deepened his understanding of printmaking, he began making silkscreen prints, requiring skilled print-makers to create different screens to produce each color in a print. As printmaking technology advanced throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, Rodrigue’s prints could use a multi-color process, reflecting a level of detail and complexity once reserved only for his paintings.

This release of The Blues Can Hide a Bad Apple uses Rodrigue’s preferred silkscreen process, resulting in a high-quality print featuring saturated colors rendered in a way that calls to mind the brushstrokes of an original painting. Done in an edition of 175, this 12 color silkscreen print of The Blues Can Hide a Bad Apple features Rodrigue’s estate stamp.