Water Taxi

 "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 river or other area of water, operated by a person who you pay to take you where you want to go."  Cambridge dictionary

Imagery comes from god only knows where. You start here and end up there, you think you're heading in one direction and you do a 180 the other way - and so it goes. How many times I've made a painting and then had to retrace my steps to the source which invariably is somewhere rooted in the subconscious. It's a recap most of us have experienced in our dreams as we unravel our state of place and its meaning to us in the here and now.

 Resettlement is a global issue today as it always has been. I recall as as kid seeing John Ford's film Grapes of Wrath and not sleeping the good sleep of a child for a while as the black and white imagery seeped into my fears of transience and insecurity. That opening scene of a man at the crossroads is a cinematic masterpiece that still leaves me speechless. 

Newfoundland is no stranger to resettlement. Out port houses being towed by boats to another location, coastal houses without occupants, abandoned boats in a state of rames (old English for nothing left but the bones), men stranded on ice flows, and books and more books on the issue of government versus the people of place. St. John's bustling with energy and newcomers - a urban/rural discourse.

Then there is the bigger connections to our collective mythology to ad to the mix. The Ferryman, the Styx, the journey to the other side, a vessel not only moving through water but also through time. You get the point. Don't pay or fix a price with the ferryman until you arrive.

This boat full of people is not a ship of fools, rather a collective of present and past. A cross section of a state of mind. Women at the bow, men in the middle, receding into the stern or the past. I can't say where they're traveling from, or where they may be traveling to, or whom they are being towed by. It's just another addition to the historical genre of crossings in painting.

 

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS