So... Every Tree Has Been Drawn?

Spruce Branch, graphite on paper, 15"x30", Steven Rhude 

She said realism was the kind of art her parents liked.

 It was a declaration steeped in an historic upheaval with white washed limitations. The avant-garde and the laws of the contemporary establishment rendered it in a minimalist text not generally meant for public consumption. Cherished and protected like the Book of Kells, it was manna for the priests of post.  

 However, it was nothing new to them, they were all seasoned realists, who heard it all before by previous provocateurs - those providers of a post modern elixir freely passed around the gallery camp fire to quell the fears of the illusion of the painted third dimension.


Oh those realists, they knew that the other art was challenging, and intelligent. They also have a healthy respect for it. Even like it when it is in the groove and is interconnected and pluralistic. But every one knows it is time for a boundary review.  


 ...the kind of art her parents liked.


 The murmurings continue. A tribal ritual dating back to a conceptual reformation - in Nova Scotia, an artistic brother/sisterhood originating from an American ex patriot monastery intent on dematerialization.    


  The statement rings like an institutional sound bite for the uninitiated who show up for the latest award ceremony; not the experienced mind behind that brush with the real - who so incisively, critically, compassionately, and daily turn heads to the landscape of the tangible, and her sister, the landscape of the mind.

  Doomed to make the same mistakes of her predecessors, the linearity of this supposition (or was it a proclamation?) laid bare the facts.

  Every tree has been drawn.


Or has it?

Kind of like saying every tree has been planted.


Or has it?

He sat on one of those artist panels, quiet an contemplative - on occasion making notes. If you saw him on a subway you couldn't place him. Probably would assume he was an accountant or had shares in a Starbucks. But if you came across his ideas somewhere... say while surfing Youtube, and heard someone ask him what a New Old Master was or what their art was about, he would probably say:

"Their art reaffirms visible reality with no sacrifice of its inner resonance. They make even the starkest appearances - and all appearances are oddly stark to the sensitive eye - pleasing with no sacrifice to their starkness. Their art is an unexpected gift in these post art times. It is an alternative art without the condescension that money, the media, and popular entertainment - and post art which is their lackey - have to their audience. New Old Master art brings us a fresh sense of the purposefulness of art - faith in the possibility of making a new aesthetic harmony out of the tragedy of life, without falsifying it - and a new sense of art's interhumanity. [1]




reference: Donald Kuspit - The End of Art, Cambridge University Press


   


Steven Rhude, Wolfville, Nova Scotia

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