Leaving Lead Cove

"It's not down on any map; true places never are."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick


Leaving Lead Cove, oil on canvas, 19" x 28", Steven Rhude

The aesthetic of many a contemporary opinion is often couched in opposites. The Newfoundland landscape and its romantic depiction for instance, may be seen as an infectious blight for some. Typified as comforting images of the landscape, artists and viewers are often bombarded with, and marginalised by, the generalisation of what may or may not be the "quintessential" expression of their land.

 For some, the depiction of a lone granite rock (erratic) on a windswept barren, could be seen as quaint; a well trodden subject offered up as comfort food at the expense of tougher subjects like power lines or satellite dishes. My experience is that this view is at best antiquated. Anyone who has walked some barrens in Newfoundland should understand the gravitational pull of something ancient with resonance. Icons take on a presence with time, not just with in contemporaneity. Our desire to capture this is not in any way conventional.

However, traversing Newfoundland means considering that yellow ribbon dissecting the land, an object as modernist as a Mondrian painting. There are times when I know I'm in Newfoundland, geographically bound by maps that help me navigate my ideas around this land in a car, armed with drawing books, camera, note books, and pens and pencils. But other times there is a leave-taking of sorts. It could be a road in northern Ontario, or a suburb just over the hill, instead of Conception Bay. This is the illusion of place, and our desire to at times transcend the material. Not a very post modern objective to say the least. But for the painter there are no maps for this kind of logic, and they didn't teach it in art college.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS  

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