Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

Maud, You're Richer Than You Think, graphite on paper, 16" x 20", Steven Rhude If the movie Maudie provoked one understanding in Nova Scotians - in particular - it was the Hollywood shadow effect over the deeper quality of her art and life, in favour of another type of value - one popularised by profit and capital as the common denominator for her success. Any artist that has endeavoured to survive this far in an effort to peddle their wares knows what they are entwined in, and how ethically challenged the commercial market is. The Maud story is common to the reality of today's art world, and provides a lens into one of exploitation, distortion, and greed. This seems to generally disconcert some people that align themselves with the latter concept of industry and profit aimed at defining her legacy through auction results and merchandise, rather than her poverty, regionalism, vision, and artistic practice - something that would defy today's understanding o...

Maud's View, rug hooking, Laura Kenney Maud Returns to Point Prim, oil on masonite, Steven Rhude The Maud Lewis story is by now legend in Nova Scotia and perhaps well on its way to the same status nationally, and no doubt already making inroads internationally. Certain elements stand out. A turn of the twentieth century birth, an unwed mother stricken with severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and the stigma of her child's adoption and denial, strange circumstances leading to a union with a poor and uneducated peddler living in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia,  and a shingle that said "paintings for sale" which was marketed, used and abused by the transition of culture from late capitalism into a neo liberal economy. Combined, these elements shed light on the culture of Nova Scotia rurality, as modernism marched its way past their painted door in Digby County.      In many respects the Maud story is one of domination, both domestically, socially, and cu...

Everett's Underwear, rug hooking, Laura Kenney Marshalltown 101, Poor House Miser, oil on masonite, Steven Rhude "The development of folk art for a museum audience in the late twentieth-century Nova Scotia coincided with changes in art education and the sales market more generally. Much like conceptualism, contemporary folk art in Nova Scotia became a site for new, academically trained arrivals to explore an artistic counter culture set quite apart from the elite collecting circles across North America that had so marked the early twentieth century and the foundation of most metropolitan art museums, include the NSMFA. The late 1960s and early 1970s had seen an influx of new MFA - degree programs across the United States - fifty three programs in studio art were inaugurated between 1965 and 1974. "  - Erin Morton, For Folk's Sake  Many trained MFA holders at NSCAD were convinced to rally around alternatively distinctive forms of art - thus folk art ...

Home is Where your House Is, rug hooking, Laura Kenney Marshalltown Road, Fixing it up for Maud, oil on canvas, Steven Rhude "The AGNS has Maud's house..and when I visit the gallery it feels like Maud is present..as opposed to Marshalltown with the MacKay - Lyons memorial...Maud doesn't live there any more. "Home is where you hang your hat"...I heard that a lot being a military brat..but really it is home is where your house is...and Maud lives in Halifax." - Laura Kenney "When MacKay - Lyons erected his replica of the of the Lewis home in 1996, Riordon heralded it as "a modern, symbolic steel house" and noted it was the result of "a community effort that reaches beyond the borders of Digby County to embrace the whole province." The AGNS's promotional materials for the event invited interested parties to "visit the original Maud Lewis house, now carefully restored and protected, and to see many of Maud Lewis'...

Flowers for Maud, rug hooking, Laura Kenney Maud, Everett and that space in between, oil on canvas, Steven Rhude Artist notebook: Maud & Everett - I can perceive only this for now: that they represent the Woman of the East with the Man of the East. Anti-modernists without knowledge of the term. Vulnerable to the tangled skein of a life choice distortion by those with a penchant for institutionalizing them and Maud's image. Unknown to Maud and Everett, were the terms of an artistic movement that became Nova Scotia's new identity; a simple folk way of life that would become the antidote for a sputtering cultural economy perched in tourism's shop window for all to partake. However, for Maud, the reality was one of making pictures; her only true way out - serial painting, like pop radio plays the top ten hits over and over. Maud made the paintings and Everett pocketed the cash. Modernism passed by their door and a white space between them developed as Maud...

“ Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit. (The need to lend a voice to suffering [literally: "to let suffering be eloquent"] is the condition of all truth)” ― Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics "The Alternative, the Poor Farm in Marshalltown, out in the country, was run as follows: If an unwed mother, circa 1930, gave birth, she and the child were removed by bailiff to the county of the mother's birth, turned over to the settlement sheriff and locked up with the poor and insane of the settlement county farm. What happened next depended entirely on the worth of the Matron, often the spouse of the keeper, Standards varied." - Lance Woolaver [1] "Historically, online there is a picture and small blurb about the Poor Farm or Poor House as it was locally known. It is now the site of the Maude Lewis heritage park. "The County Incorporation Act of 1879 stated that each county was now responsible for buildin...

Roxanne rowing off Canso during WW2, oil on canvas, Steven Rhude https://issuu.com/abbozzogallery/docs/celebrating_canada__10_

"Who would true valour see, let him come hither; One here will constant be, come wind, come weather. There's no discouragement,  shall make him once relent,  His first avowed intent  To be a pilgrim." - John Bunyan's Original Version, To be a Pilgrim The Day Maud Died, rug hooking, Laura Kenney The Day Maud Died, oil on masonite, Steven Rhude What constitutes the spirit of a house? This question may indeed point to the reason so many made their way to Maud's house, to meet Maud, and leave with a painting commemorating their journey and experience. A desire to apprehend and understand a particular spirit that was on her own pilgrimage - the sacred site being her own memories of Nova Scotia made manifest through panel boards, paint, and a corner studio with a window. Her grid to a point of departure. Her way out of the restrictions imposed upon her by the conventions of her body and rural society. However, as much as the tiny house became a barr...

Bringing it Back to Marshalltown, rug hooking, Laure Kenne y     Marshalltown Road, oil on masonite, Steven Rhude     "As long as I've got a brush in front of me, I'm alright." - Nova Scotian folk artist Maud Lewis    Maud Lewis makes this defiant statement at the end of the CBC documentary 'Folk artist Maud Lewis at work in her Nova Scotian home' . [1] In the 1965 profile, CBC's Telescope  introduces viewers to the artist and her husband at work in and around their house, and speaks to friends and supporters. It frames Maud and Everett Lewis as anti modernists caught up in the wake of a nostalgic view from the Digby region of a province rapidly embracing changes that came with modernism and the respective economic circumstances influencing rural existence at the time. Aggressively putting Nova Scotia history and folk culture in the shop window for all to see became a government strategy fully illuminated by the work of folk artist...

Roxanne Rowing off Canso During WW2, oil on canvas, 52" x 32". Steven Rhude Abbozzo Gallery, Toronto: In honour of Canada Day and the 150th anniversary of Confederation, we’ve mounted an exhibition in the Main Gallery and The Project Room featuring art work by our artists from across the country, representing different areas of Canada, and sometimes art work that just has the colour red!  http://abbozzogallery.com/confederation-150/  

Recent article in the Local Express https://www.localxpress.ca/local-arts-and-life/monet-meets-the-maritime-buoy-in-steven-rhudes-new-exhibit-632214 Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

de Chirico's Voyage, oil on masonite, 24" x 20", Steven Rhude "In the neighborhood I grew up in, people did not spend time outside their houses. I often played games as a child that centered around life after a neutron bomb. I would imagine I was the only person left alive; solitary, playing with my Hula-hoop in the driveway; the TVs flickering through the windows of houses nearby were simply remnants of a lost civilization. If I walked into one, I’d find a skeleton sitting in a La-Z-Boy bathed in the glow of The Price Is Right ."  - Cara Hoffman https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/03/06/vanishing-point/ Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS  

Monet's Moment, oil on masonite, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude "For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value." Claude Monet (1891); as quoted in: National Gallery of Australia, ‎Michael Lloyd, ‎Michael Desmond (1992), European and American paintings and sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery, p. 75

Matisse's Blue Cipher, oil on masonite, 14" x 12", Steven Rhude To Shear: 1. To remove (fleece or hair) by cutting or clipping. 2. To remove the hair or fleece from. 3. To cut with or as if with shears: shearing a hedge. 4. To divest or deprive as if by cutting Even though it makes a good story that the aged Matisse turned to cut outs as illness struck, it is known that he first experimented with the concept in the 1930's. However, "drawing in space", as Matisse called it, suggests a code or disguised form of expression, and with a pair of tailor shears it is nothing short of enchanting as his late work involved large hand painted coloured papers, cutting, pins, and the flux of compositional manuvering.  Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

Picasso's Dream, oil on masonite, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude Picasso in many respects was one big dream, or nightmare depending on how one views his art and time, and his various artistic periods. Picasso's portrayal of contemporary man and his wars, was very much the story of man's inhumanity to man with little time to consider the consequences of his actions, or spiritual decline. Carnality for Picasso was the antidote.  Dreaming turbulently, mirroring an image of the twentieth century, Picasso's world was deeply inhabited by those women he seduced and transformed into his muses, consuming them until his creativity was almost exhausted, enough so that a new muse was needed to enable the dream to continue, and so making their dreams into his dream as the cycle of the artist/model manifested. The muse for Picasso's "The Dream" was Marie-Thérèse Walter whom he met when she was seventeen and he in his forties. In 1977, four years after Picas...

Olympia's Gaze, oil on masonite, 20" x 24", Steven Rhude “The word scandal originates in the Greek skandalon, which means "trap, snare, stumbling block." The viewers of Olympia at the 1865 salon acted as if they were trapped by this provocative image, able to respond only with derisive hostility and contempt. Indeed, the Bourgeois public took such offense at this apparent affront to its morality that the painting had to be rehung high up out of its retaliatory reach. Not even professional critics, as Clark has demonstrated, were able to articulate any kind of coherent, intelligent response to Olympia in terms of form, content, technique, sources, or purpose.  They did little more than confirm the public's offended incomprehension. Like the Goncourts viewing La Paiva, the journalists seem to have relished their reduction of the prostitute to a dead and decomposing body, a painted corpse. Their rhetoric may be sensational and hyperbolic, but its emph...

Lemieux's Solitude, oil on masonite, 14" x 13", Steven Rhude Jean Paul Lemieux's painting "The Nun" was born into existence in nineteen sixty seven. It was the phenomenon of the summer of love, primarily in San Fransisco, but celebrated also throughout parts the rest of the US and Canada. A counter culture then held the belief that "A new concept of celebrations beneath the human underground must emerge, become conscious, and be shared, so a revolution can be formed with a renaissance of compassion, awareness, and love, and the revelation of unity for all mankind. "[1]   Throughout the twentieth century, Jean Paul Lemieux lived with the power of the Catholic clergy's long and sustained role in Quebec politics, culture and the domestic environment. Inspired by the Italian primitives, Lemieux found a way to both capture the moral rigidity and loneliness, (yet with an undercurrent of humour) of those called to a religious order and mona...

Degas' Song, oil on masonite, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude “Degas’s interest in depicting the energetic and evocative gestures of such performers,” write Saywell and Wolohojian, “is reflected in a letter in which he urges a friend to ‘go at once to hear Thérésa at the Alcazar. She opens her large mouth and there emerges the most roughly, the most delicately, the most spiritually tender voice imaginable.’” http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/07/mad-for-degas.html Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

Hopper's Door to the Sea, oil on masonite, 16" x 14", Steven Rhude     Ever since I read Gail Levin's bio on Edward Hopper, I've had mixed feelings about his art. I realise ones art should stand alone and the separation of church and state is a reasonable maxim when thinking of the relationship between two married artists, as was the case with Jo and Edward Hopper. However, painting is never so compartmentalised as that, and neither are people. In Jo's case freedom equated with latitude - the mobile kind we take for granted today. In the 1950's that latitude came in the form of a car. Jo Hopper was fiercely independent and realised that driving an automobile (as it was called back then) gave one a kind of liberty for all sorts of things, especially from the confines of a Truro summer retreat and an over bearing husband. "Although occupied with painting, Jo renewed her campaign to drive. Harking back to her strongest argument, she again threat...

O'keeffe's Bones, oil on masonite, 16" x 14.5", Steven Rhude "I would have been willing to stay on in Canada if it hadn't been so terribly cold," she declared. http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/georgia-o-keeffe-exhibit-examines-modern-art-pioneer-in-global-context-1.4076250 No doubt about it, Georgia O'keeffe was not only one of the best modern painters of her time, but also a warm weather gal. Out of her element when it came to Canada, with it's climatic warehouse of cold fronts claimed by American weather millenarianists, to be regularly exported down to the mid western states, eastern seaboard, and further, surely to disrupt their Edenic enterprise prior to the second coming, Georgia was having nothing to do with this, or cold weather repentance. She wanted warmth and dry bones.  Notwithstanding the surreal popularity of her landscapes and flowers, it was her bones that did it for this snowlander. The idea of a bleached artifact ...

Modiglianni's Muse, oil on masonite, 13.5" x 27.5", Steven Rhude A lot of artists meet their soul mates in art college. Some unions last, while others disintegrate quickly. Jeanne Hébuterne  had a talent for drawing, and chose to study at the Académie Colarossi . It was there in the spring of 1917 that she was introduced to Amedeo Modigliani. Three years later, while pregnant, she pitched herself out of an apartment window to her death. "The last drawing Jeanne made in the 40 hours or so that passed from the moment of Amedeo’s death to that of her own shows her lying dead, with a stiletto in her hand, on the bed where she used to sit for Modi." [1]  An account: On 24 January 1920 Amedeo Modigliani died. Jeanne Hébuterne's family brought her to their home but Jeanne threw herself out of the fifth-floor apartment window two days after Modigliani's death, killing herself and her unborn child. Her family, who blamed her demise on Modigliani...

Red Fish, oil on canvas, Steven Rhude Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart's heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier, Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom ...