Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

Ten Wooden Buoys on a Road, oil on board, 24"x48, Steven Rhude Poem for a Byland Ten wooden buoys ly'in on a road; in a liquid city, they reap what they sow. Nine wooden buoys in the land of the fey; can't set their pots til the middle of May. Eight wooden buoys carved from the tree; when it came to a price, they couldn't agree. Seven wooden buoys rowed to the dance; two got drowned, the rest were in a trance. Why did the wind blow em of course? Did they hear the women wail til they were hoarse? When did the young leave their fair shore? Where did they go, do they hear the night waves roar? Six wooden buoys look'in for their boat; lost their quota and the rope don't float. Five wooden buoys - one was fat; got a job in Toronto as a bureaucrat. Four wooden buoys on a train out west; came back home in their Sunday best. Three wooden buoys, their sills were rotton; the rames picked clean, they scoured the bottom. How many cuts can they en...

"Facilis decensus averni; nocets atque dies patet atrie ianua Ditus; sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad aurus. hoc opus, hic labour est." "It is easy to go down into hell;  Night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; But to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task." Virgil - Ecologues Book Vl, line 126 Charles Burchfield "I took the train from Pittsburg to Steubenville, with a certain misgiving in my mind - I was going to visit again my Ohio river country, that I knew and loved in 1920 and 1921 - but would I find it changed, or I so changed that it would have lost it's charm for me? That neither happened fills me with great intoxicating  joy. A bitterly cold day - at Steubenville, I seek the hilly street where in 1921 I made a pencil study of some old houses - I find them practically unchanged after eleven years - perhaps a little better - After making another study I ...