Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

   Years ago, or in one of those 'time out of mind' nights, on the furthest most easterly point of mainland Nova Scotia , Canso poet and dear friend, June N. Jarvis, told me of a tragic, painful, and sad poem she wrote. It's a poem with vengeance and a curse that starts when a young woman is as they say - led astray by a young man. It's about the days of yore, the sea and all the allegory it represents. It's about a woman's decent into supernatural darkness and the August gales that accompanied her.  This is a familiar story in the sense that it is tied to the very nature of folklore, yet like all memorable folklore, it still has a powerful resonance to contemporary times. It entails, a young woman and sex, the passage of time, fishing commerce, a Canso ship in distress, the loss of Betsy's seventeen year old daughter to the sea, and the inability to console, where reparations are like gulls uselessly screeching in a tempest. It is a tale that is

  C rossroads have always intrigued me, both literally and figuratively. If I were to follow the idea that I’m living in a strange twilight between the tangible world I belong to and the painted world I create, I could metaphorically refer to this as some sort of "crossroads". I don't meditate, probably should, but I still on occasion murmer a prayer. However while doing these flower still life paintings I believe the elements that comprise them - light, the sea, atmosphere, wood, lead, cloth, plant and petals - are in their own way meditations on some of the things I find mysterious and yet calming, beautiful but indifferent. Steven Rhude, Wolfville                                                         Orchid with Three Buoys, oil on canvas, 40" x 30", Steven Rhude       Iris and Adam, oil on canvas, 28" x 38", Steven Rhude          Magnolia (Trio at Dusk), oil on canvas, 19" x 19", Steven Rhude