Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

  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

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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