Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

Water Taxi, oil on masonite, 24" x 24", Emma Butler Gallery   What makes me happy? Well it’s typical of me to look up the etymology of the word “Happy” first. What I found was the old English approach - lucky, favoured by fortune, greatly pleased and content. Happy medium, happy ending, oh happy days…one of my favourites is “happy hour”. I’ve always believed that a painter operates at a particular crossroads. It’s a problematic location, but assuming that I’m living in that strange twilight between the tangible world I belong to and the painted world I create, well that is one aspect of living that makes me happy.  Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

  Port de Grave Peddler, oil on canvas, 38" x 41", Steven Rhude "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."  Henry David Thoreau Making subject matter is a preoccupation with painters that value narrative. However, narrative is not always so willing or apparent a partner to the painter until well after the fact; that is, well after a visual encounter may have taken place and time has lapsed. The painter relies on memory, notes, drawings, etc., to re kindle the experience, but eventually it is the unpacking of a scene by the subconscious and the recurrence of its characteristics that evolve to the point where a commitment to canvas is made, and a painting is eventually executed.  I'm particularly fond of the fishing community of Port de Grave, Newfoundland. It's one of those places that seems to transport me to a particular crossroads where I tend to operate. It's that strange twilight between the tangible world I belong to and th...

You have to wonder how many times "They stand at the ships railings in woolen coats to watch cathedrals of ice moving south..." Hard Light, Michael Crummy Cathedral of Ice, oil on canvas, 17" x 23", Steven Rhude You: You read books about the rock, you go there, you picture this and that, imagine the worst and the best, you observe water and ice, barrens and cities. You interview, draw, debate, discuss, ruminate, and in the end go back to the people that initiated your passion. You do not know it from the inside, yet you know the measure of it from the outside, it's all you have. He looks at you beneath brows like straw. He asks you... no, he tells you one day, 'to make sure you never let it become a hobby'. You make a promise you will keep. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

  Study of a Fish Plant Worker, oil on canvas, 20" x 23", Steven Rhude, at  www.emmabutler.com Her job duty was evident and simple, to cut, clean and trim fish or seafood prior to marketing or further processing. Specifically, she was to cut fish, separate fillets, and remove scrap parts using a knife. Also, there was the issue of checking fillets to determine optimal size of fillet sections, cut those sections according to specifications and place in a container to be weighed. Her wages range from thirteen to eighteen dollars per hour. He had seen fish plant workers from Canso to Newfoundland, their shift work day and night. He recalled his routine trips to the Co-op for groceries. He could see the fish plant from the parking lot - see the workers in their rubber boots out on break getting some sun or a smoke - see the life on their aprons and facial expressions - but that was a long time ago when National Sea Products employed around six hundred people at the plant, before...

  Dory at Madrocks, oil on canvas, 38" x 41", Steven Rhude  www.secordgallery.com "Being able to hold the thread of a painting tightly is the mark of a good artist. Such textural elements must be stretched tight if the friction of the elements is to be effective. Lesser artists may attempt to work with these ideas of texture, but something usually gives, the line falls slack, the suspension sags and the works don't have that captured energy that we see here. For Rhude, there's tension in the almost surreal contrast of his subjects which are often placed in paradoxical situations.You can feel the slight rub of confusion - why is the buoy on the overturned boat? How can the shed be in the surf? In that moment of disjointed comprehension, behind the smooth, enjoyable surface of the painting, Rhude's texture opens up a culture of inquiry - the political meaning of an unemployed fisherman for example - a visual expression of our society's pressing questions. R...

Portrait of Raymond E. Ivany, 15th President of Acadia University, oil on canvas, 48" x 40", Steven Rhude, Collection of Acadia University      The story goes that in 1961, Robert Rauschenberg was invited to participate in a show at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. All the invited artists were requested to create a portrait of the gallery owner Iris Clert. One artist, Robert Rauschenberg who left  things to the last minute decided to send a telegram to Iris saying "this is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so/Robert Rauschenberg." Clert, so it goes, in a fit of anger threw the telegram in the garbage only to reclaim it after reconsidering the audacity of the gesture and hung the telegram on the gallery wall with the other portraits. This was the sort of rupture in modernist thinking that has led us to constantly reevaluate what exactly a portrait is or is not as the function of portraiture was pushed into the foreground - beyond the subject.   "Nothing in a portr...

  He used to think about her during a hurricane. Going to a hardware store with no name and purchasing supplies and preparing to ensure the storm doesn't take them up in it's wake. Strange though, the thrill of her just continuing to paint as the ocean rose, breaching the beach and flooding their property and their only car - a Doge Colt of all things... not caring for the aftermath. Too much Turner perhaps; too many turbulent paintings in the carousel of western man. But she was right.       Now Fiona is destined (he likes her name).  Yet he wonders: "why do hurricanes consolidate circumstances?" He checks for batteries and flashlights.   Steven Rhude, Wolfville

  Boat Shed, Can't See Cove,   www.secordgallery.com oil on canvas, 36" x 52", Steven Rhude “He wasn’t a religious man but a vision of what Paradise might be came to him, a windowed room afloat on an endless sea, walls packed floor to ceiling with all the books ever written or dreamed of. It was nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable.” ― Michael Crummey - Galore   In a strange way, a summer fishing camp was for a fishermen, nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable. Remarkable in their undisclosed number, some were squatter camps on crown land, some were built and furnished better than their houses on the mainland. Attempts to rid the islands of these places have come and gone - some government orders left to linger on the slush piles of more than one bureaucratic conflict of interest. This may be the essence of what a "Can't see Cove" really is. A windowed room or shack afloat on an endless sea.   Steven Rhude, Wolfville...

      I always get a sense when driving throughout Newfoundland that there is a secret on the edge of disclosure. It may be hidden inside a coastal house, or lingering like a spirit around a wharf at dusk. It's like that feeling you get as you approach a group of strangers and they become reticent. You sense they're protecting something. That's what I love about the place, you just know the story goes deeper than clapboard. This mindset invariably leads me to a visual event. It usually starts with something familiar; a house, a boat, or a road etc, and then I reinscribe it for something else... as one would reinscribe an object for further contemplation. The road is the most tangible metaphor I can think of for exploration. As we drive the rules of the road influence what we see around us. However, between the rules there are no directions for us, other than our will to keep moving. We may only see an unromantic image of road and barrens viewed through...

 "This is not the 1960s, Mr. Sweetland. This move isn't being forced on the town. We will pay to resettle the residents, as we've been asked to do. But we will not be responsible for some lunatic alone in the middle of the Atlantic once everyone else is gone." "Me being the lunatic." "There won't be any ferry service after the move. Which means no supplies coming in. There will be no phone service. No online banking, no poker. No electricity. By definition, I'd think anyone out here on their own would have to be certifiable." The government man glanced at his watch. "You've been made aware of the September deadline." "I been made aware." "There are people hoping to make the move across as early as this fall, which means everyone would have to sign by the first." Michael Crummy, Sweetland Water Taxi, oil on masonite, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude Definition of Water Taxi: "a small boat on a...

 Eight Men with Dory (Upper Island Cove), oil on canvas, 24" x 34", Steven Rhude “He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea       Simone La : So Rhude time for another Q&A session.The nature of two artists living and working together i...

                    House of Lace, (Ochre Pit), Emma Butler Gallery, oil on canvas, 36" x 48", Steven Rhude For centuries in art, certainly since the renaissance, there has always been depicted for contemplation a house configured in mind and spirit. It may take numerous shapes and forms, but invariably it is not just "a house", but  "the house." However, whose house it is may often be up for debate, and to whom the house belongs is still collectively an issue in the twenty first century. Some consider it a house prepared - a spiritual house, others think of it as a psychological house - one in which we associate our multitude of experiences within a structure of faith and mental latitude, rooms of growth, sex, and change... rooms of sadness and grief... rooms of death and  revelation, rooms of  social exchange and the expression of ideas that attach or eventually dissolve within the walls of our individual or personal mem...

                        A Moment at Youghall Beach, O/C, 40" x 60", private collection, Steven Rhude "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."  Simone Weil In this age of the digital revolution, the beach, wherever it may be, may become the most sensible and tangible place to reflect on for our well being - body and soul. When we are on a beach it cleanses our collective predisposition to ponder the intransigent qualities of our existence. A beach washes those concerns away. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

  Blomidon Lovers, oil on masonite, 12" x 24", Steven Rhude I'm pleased to be part of the group show "Art Blanche" at Gallery 78 in Fredericton NB.  https://gallery78.com/collections/art-blanche-february-2022/products/blomidon-lovers-12569

  I'm pleased to have three serigraphs in "On Paper" at the Emma Butler Gallery in St. John's NL. See link below. https://www.emmabutler.com/2022-prints.htm    Dories on the Line, Serigraph, image size 16" x 28", Steven Rhude