Road Paintings

Buoy and Manhole, oil on board, 20"x24", Gallery 78


The use of the road as a motif in contemporary painting should by now, stand out as a universal symbol of movement and transition. In fact, roads are by chance imbued with some of the most salient traits of modernist painting we have come to know vicariously through the hard edge works of twentieth century practitioners like America's Barnett Newman or Quebec's Guido Molinari. We could even conjure up the  godfather of modernism - Piet Mondrian and his omnipresent grid. The very linear bands of yellow used to control visual placement and movement of cars and the graphic flatness of asphalt, suggest paintings in themselves - canvases without end.


Buoy and Broken Line, oil on board, 20"x24", Gallery 78

The placement and incongruity of objects in a road that is normally used for the transit of humans or goods, arrests the attention of the viewer through experiential means. Suggestions of avoidance (think of swerving to miss a squirrel or deer in the road) to those who drive, are part of the baggage we bring to the stasis of the road image.



   Ten Buoys on a Road, oil on board, Steven Rhude
                                                                                                                                                                                                                           


The addition of the buoy, which happens to be a sculptural object imbued with generations of regional culture, intersects with the contemporary paved road - a universal concern today connecting communities, towns, cities, and countries.


Buoy on a Road, oil on board, 18"x24", Roberts Gallery


Steven Rhude, Wolfville, Nova Scotia

      

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