Cabot's Window

Cabot's Window, o/p, 20" x 24", Steven Rhude

Perhaps the twentieth century tried more than any other era to define painting, or at least to analyse the act of painting. It says a lot about the self consciousness of the times. It obliterated the representational image - and then went and retrieved it from the rubbish bin. It divorced itself from the use of the human figure in painting - and then scurried to make up again and bring it back into the post modern pantheon of representation. It ushered in several emblems of contemporary culture from Campbell Soup cans to the grids of Mondrian. Which brings us to windows.

One of the longest living emblems of the painting act, the window and its meaning can carry us backwards or forwards depending on our current conventions. As a flat surface it can propel us easily into the illusion of space. Or, conversely, be abstracted into a barrier to reality, allowing the viewer to attain their own aesthetic experience within a rigid two dimensional space.

Windows can open us up to infinite depth, or convey a sense of entrapment  or enclosure - a kind of psychological imprisonment. They are commonly used as divisions between the spiritual and the material worlds, and have been used by some of the twentieth century's  most celebrated 'bad boys' for the purposes of anti-art; in effect expressing the turbulent dreams of a chaotic century seen through the motif of a shattered window. Duchamp comes immediately to mind. However we see windows, they are very much an extended paradox. At once revealing the different states of our  being (ie; existential, the human condition, or our various activities and actions), and yet still, as physical structures, mediating our relationship between the interior and the exterior world.

The window portrayed in this painting is located in the Cabot Tower in St John's Newfoundland. The Signal Hill where flags were once the means of conveying the identity of incoming ships, for among other things, a means of security. It is the high point of the city and, by positioning oneself at this window, one can easily move from thoughts of the past to ones of the present, mediated by a window at least three to four feet in depth.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS.