Burning the Light

Burning the Light, oil on canvas, 36"x40", Steven Rhude, Gallery 78 


The question for a lot of painters is, why can't we just make a painting? So many artists past and present have gone down this road towards a goal of pure painting. Routes like abstraction, hard edge, formalism, minimalism... and so on. For some, it is unnecessary to have a narrative - a divergent path is chosen in light of the lengthy history involved with image making in the west. So the narrative is eschewed in favour of alternative processes. I've tried this myself in the past, only to find the powers of the external world are to extensive to ignore - for everything could be other than it is. We are sometimes seduced into thinking that ordinariness is a moment in time when nothing of significance occurs. The problem is, there are no moments when nothing occurs.

The lighthouse has been withdrawn from the world of human habitation. No one stands in the light and looks down on the sea from the lantern. There are no ships to coordinate - no temperatures to record. In the painting Burning the Light, the light has been graphically stolen and relocated, spirited away by tales of government funeral pyres - to a nondescript highway; a contemporary table top evoking the history and tradition of memento mori - part of the artists' symbolic lexicon dealing with the nature of absence and presence in the tangible world. However, there is no desire to just show or illustrate the emptiness or despair in such an event; just the opposite. You show the wish for it to be full.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS.




Comments

  1. Len27 May 2012 at 14:47

    When was this painting made? (just curious)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Steven Rhude27 May 2012 at 19:11

      Hi Len,

      I made the painting in 2010 in response to the Federal Government declaring our light houses 'surplus'. I actually had a show of about 25 works pertaining to the theme 'declared surplus' in Halifax based on the cultural and navigational abandonment of our lighthouses.

      best, Steven

      Delete

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