Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

The Artist as Journeyman The journey to foreign lands has long been the modus operandi for countless painters, the objectives divergent with each situation. Some artists travel great distances for inspiration and historical study, while others remain within their own country exploring province and region. Conceptually, it's why Edward Hopper went to France to study in his early years of development, tugging at the coat strings of the impressionists, and how Allegheny, Pennsylvania born Mary Cassat, only began to live after ending up in Paris. It’s what happened to Marsden Hartley who found Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia in 1935, and shacked up with the Mason family of fishermen, furnishing an account of island life, and the sudden drowning of Alty and Donny Mason. And it’s where in 1919, the Group of Seven preternaturally formed after Tom Thompson’s death, and pioneered in oil, what was once a sacred Canadian north. We mustn't forget Paul Gauguin, a stock broker turned painter. He lef...

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                                                          Antler Man, oil on canvas, 17" x 30", Steven Rhude He's out of touch with today. The Ashley Book of Knots is his bible - a means of survival and metaphor for when the evenings linger on. The antlers were put up by his father. He volunteers for the local fire department and goes to the legion on Friday nights - when he can. He's built and re built several wharves, and buried a few of his mates. His last name could be Leblanc, or Dobson, or Murphy ... really doesn't matter now. The narrative is all that counts from here on in. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

                            The Fortunate Isles (Two Boats, Salmon Cove), oil on canvas, 38.5" x 58", Steven Rhude Fool: Where are we now? Jester: As usual, you're on the edge - this time gazing towards the Fortunate Isles.  Fool: Oh Christ, and what are they prey tell? Jester: Hey, you apprenticed and took the job... after four hundred years, I'm just fixing on retirement. So, if you wish to know, you are standing on the margin between the known world and the under world. It's the last car to Elysian Fields [1] my dear fool, as Mr. James Lee Burke once wrote -  but for you it may be thought to be a utopia, somewhere in the Atlantic ocean . Fool: So who gets in? Jester: Well, the odd mortal is allowed in, but that is up to the heroic and the righteous. Depends on what they see.  Fool: So you're talking about the after life. Jester: Yes, to the Greeks it was a concern. But for you it must be a a modern p...

                                           Tiverton Shed Doorway, oil on canvas, 18" x 18", Steven Rhude It's human nature to pry, to mentally open a door, and to want to see behind what has become a secret society.  Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

                                            Out Port Girls (Bonavista Light), oil on canvas, 24" x 36', Steven Rhude    'I can't think of anything the [maids] didn't do They got the coal, cleaned and washed and got the big copper pot boiling to wash the sheets with lye . . . . They had a regular routine for the housekeeping and cooking . . . . I was 5, 6, 7, 8; they were probably 17, 18, 19 but they seemed adult. They stayed for years, some of them, and usually left to get married.” So recalled Janet Story, a St. John’s nurse and nursing archivist, of her childhood years during the interwar era. Janet Kelly, a prominent city businesswoman, remembered that “almost everybody had maids. We did when I was a young kid. My father worked in St. Mary’s Bay, so we had a source, people who knew the family and would trust us with a young girl coming to St. John’s. It was not just...

                                                 Cape Spear (Still Life), oil on canvas, 24" x 36", Steven Rhude You're not one to take a building at face value, that's why you always go around back just to see what's lurking there. So you try to evoke the atmosphere or emotional resonance of it's location by stepping inside the mind of 'the building' and the mind of 'the place', and by extension, yourself the painter. There is nothing really still about the life at Cape Spear. Even though the day is idyllic and nature has called a ceasefire for now, you know when the wind whips, and the gales come with unimaginable force - alone, you would probably cower like a spooked dog. So the title of this work is definitely a bit of an oxymoron. However, you put the day in your pocket and take it home. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS   

                                                       Brigus Rock (The Stoic), oil on canvas, 36"  x48", Steven Rhude Being  stoic  is being calm and almost without any emotion. When you're  stoic , you don't show what you're feeling and you also accept whatever is happening. The noun  stoic  is a person who's not very emotional. The adjective  stoic  describes any person, action, or thing that seems emotionless and almost blank. Mr. Spock, from the oldest  Star Trek  show, was a great example of a stoic person: he tried to never show his feelings. Someone yelling, crying, laughing, or glaring is not stoic. Stoic people calmly go with the flow and don't appear to be shook up by much .  The hike to Brigus Light is arduous and not for the faint of heart. In unusually hot weather, and poorly equip...

                                                        Battery Sheds, oil on canvas, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude At the entrance to St. John's harbor, on the slopes of Signal hill, a neighborhood called the 'Battery' is located. Reminiscent of a pell-mell kind of out port, fishermen sheds and houses clung to the slopes like sea birds in all sorts of weather. A google aerial view will now show that gentrification has transformed it since the days when it was home to 'chain rock', a chain that connected it to Fort Amherst, in order to prevent the entry of enemy ships into St. John's harbor. Later it was replaced by an anti-submarine net as warfare was modernized with WW2.                                      Battery Wharf, oil on canvas, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude...

                             Two Innocents (Cape Spear Barrens), oil on canvas, 36" x 48", Steven Rhude I've always believed it is important to lack the ability to make the distinction between history and the present. One informs the other in painting, so the distinction needs to be suppressed at times. This work started out as an appreciation of the Cape Spear Barrens in all its moodiness. I gestured some figures in with the intent that their ambiguous forms could easily be painted out, and the work would go safely back to a more or less factual account of a hike I took along this melancholic barren place of natural wonder.  To be uneducated and "innocent" of worldly things today is a risky proposition. However, to have acquired knowledge of the natural world as it can be passed down through a generation or two can amount to survival if you originate from an out port in Newfoundland. The painting's tit...

                                                        Heart's Desire, oil on canvas, 23" x 60", Steven Rhude   "A car pulled up and a man got out, said as he looked in the box. "What's this for, and you're in my way, can't you see I got to get to the docks." His suit was fine and his car was sweet, and pockets were filled with cash. He looked so close at the bottom line, with a wink and a blink and a dash.    He said, "Son, there's nothing left here, why don't you just  move on,  south to the city of sin. There's lights and cars, sidewalks and bars, a meat dress in a show called Skin." I said, ''No thanks kind sir, if it's all the same - is that your suit or a silhouette? My box is full, but not with fish, rather tragedy, toil and sweat. It’s been shipped here and over there, it's even come back another colour. So tim...

                                         Two Flags, Broad Cove. oil on masonite, 11" x 14", Steven Rhude  It's really a tiny painting - about 11" x 14" in scale. It depicts a remote cove on the Avalon peninsula where a few fishermen live and congregate. They are outliers and the flags suggests something about their societal disposition. They live far away from the world of European art, and a cultural frame of reference excessively imbued with historical  discoveries. They don't think about examples of scale that reign from Michelangelo's colossal Sistine chapel to Vermeer's micro tiny Lacemaker, where it's Dutch frame may account  for more per square inch aesthetic than the work it encases. They are immune to this logic. They fish, cut wood, drive Dodge Ram trucks and are no doubt connected to the internet. They go to the Lions club, socialize, recite poetry, tell sto...

                                          Work in progress, Outlier, Ochre Pit Cove, oil on canvas, 28" x 50", Steven Rhude   The composition of place runs through us with different expressions, but the same rule always applies - it knows no chronology in an individual's life. It can be a dream place or a literal place. Place became more defined for me as I aged, and it took on memorable names like Avalon. I routinely see it while running errands in New Minas, or cutting the grass at my Wolfville home. Standing in line at the local grocery store, or with the kids at the supper table. I saw it before I was ever there, and subsequently ever since my first visit to the peninsula. This is what seduction can do to you. It rearranges your understanding of place from literal to something more mythical - dreamlike.