Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

 Equilibrium, Grates Cove,  oil on board, 14" x 18", Steven Rhude  The Avalon fires didn't reach the tip of the peninsula, but other communities were far less fortunate. Ochre Pit Cove where I've stayed on occasion lost numerous houses and out buildings. Fire has an aggressive yet unpredictable logic - why one place is spared and another becomes embers and ashes is anyone's guess. I've heard the saying don't cry for something that can't cry back - still the summer of 2025 has left many struggling to regain some kind of equilibrium. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

                           The House Where Nobody Lives, oil on panel, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude " Well, the paint is all cracked, it was peeled off of the wood The papers were stacked on the porch where I stood And the weeds had grown up just as high as the door There were birds in the chimney and an old chest of drawers Looks like no one will ever come back. to the house where nobody lives." - TW The house in art; so many visual depictions... well for me it reflects the life cycle. It's a tactile artifact that elicits the internal geography of two individuals. Sadly at times humans outlive love. We are born, live, love, even hate, and then die. The strange thing is that objects often outlive our lives and also obliquely provide a testament to our spirit - whether our love endured or not. If this house were a map, and we could enter, we could chart our way around it from a domestic perspective. However, most symboli...

                                       Two Women from Can't See Cove, oil on panel, 24" x 38", Steven Rhude The story goes there were two Methodist women about to marry. It's of course Shakespearian in nature since their religion differed from their Catholic husbands to be. Confronted by the Catholic priest they were told if they didn't convert they would each be turned into a goat. The priest was challenged to carry out his threat with the reasoning that if he could change them into a goat he could easily change them back into women. The premise being if the priest was successful they would gladly change their religion. Ah, the competition among clerics for converts. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS  

 Poacher's Place, Can't See Cove, oil on panel, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude As a kid he caught Capelin for free, Dove for scallops and the odd lobster. He probably never got that out of his system... in a way it made him what he is today. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS 

                 Woman in a Boat, Can't See Cove, oil on canvas, 40" x 48", Available through Secord Gallery "Can't See Cove" is pure fiction. However, off Canso and Little Dover there are numerous - hidden away - summer fishing camps. Too many to document and consider. Squatting and local politics aside, they can marvel you in their other worldly sense, an otherwise place far removed from the post modern logic of virtual reality. My "Can't See Cove" series will always be a composite, an amalgamation of memory and an ever so brief awakening. How one can travel from the cradle of the renaissance to the huts of "Can't See Cove" is anyone's guess. Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

  Harvest Gallery   462 Main Street W olfville, NS, Canada B4P 1W7 Tues thru Saturday, 11am - 5pm Gallery -(902) 542-7093   Mobile (902)670-7379 harvestgallery@gmail.com Cover Image: Woman descending a Lighthouse, oil on board, 18” diameter    New Oils and Watercolours     J une 7th to 29th "There is no such thing as passive vision... only active envisioning, that is the creative constructing of a vision from a certain perceptual perspective." - Donald Kuspit   Painting from Memory The road is a liminal space for you. One part being the love of a place left behind, the other being the love of a place you imagined it to be. The difference sho...

  Monastery hallway, oil on panel, 24" x 30". I once took an inventory of hallways and corridors I could recall in my life. I started with the obvious, my childhood house, apartments, underground parking lots, schools etc, - t hen I considered secondary hallways like government institutions, hospitals, commercial agencies and the like, places I moved through without any aesthetic sensibility. Later on I recalled incidental corridors that were repetitious, like in hotels, art school, or civil engineering facilities, and then after school there were house corridors where parties took place. And cottage hallways of summer relief from academic rigor and discipline. Then I recounted anonymous houses where I restored flooring, long hallways with personal history scored and marked into its grainy disposition, a logic of mind and spirit that took years for me to understand. Thankfully there were doors and windows providing a mental exit when necessary. However these are the literal ...

  A Monastery in Greece, oil on panel. So you're in a monastery in Greece and the first thing you notice upon entering is every female visitor requires a shawl to cover up any unprotected back, shoulder, or a suggestive dress. Of course, everyone goes with the rules of decorum, and then we notice a deep open well filled with coins. You make a wish, they fund their enterprise. You have always had a propensity to explore the cordoned off areas of any institution, so you wander and then lean over a plastered sill and wonder what really constitutes a monastic... (doesn't matter whether man or woman) - to shut oneself off from the secular world of temptation and so forth runs through your thoughts. You like the aesthetics of the green door and then it opens. A millisecond lapses and this individual does sense your presence and looks up briefly - then away. You are now the observer observed. - Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

  Black Door, Greek Monastery (Αντίπαξος), oil on masonite “…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans” ― Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes Steven Rhude Wolfville, NS