Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

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 ...