Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

  Dory at Madrocks, oil on canvas, 38" x 41", Steven Rhude  www.secordgallery.com "Being able to hold the thread of a painting tightly is the mark of a good artist. Such textural elements must be stretched tight if the friction of the elements is to be effective. Lesser artists may attempt to work with these ideas of texture, but something usually gives, the line falls slack, the suspension sags and the works don't have that captured energy that we see here. For Rhude, there's tension in the almost surreal contrast of his subjects which are often placed in paradoxical situations.You can feel the slight rub of confusion - why is the buoy on the overturned boat? How can the shed be in the surf? In that moment of disjointed comprehension, behind the smooth, enjoyable surface of the painting, Rhude's texture opens up a culture of inquiry - the political meaning of an unemployed fisherman for example - a visual expression of our society's pressing questions. R

Portrait of Raymond E. Ivany, 15th President of Acadia University, oil on canvas, 48" x 40", Steven Rhude, Collection of Acadia University      The story goes that in 1961, Robert Rauschenberg was invited to participate in a show at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. All the invited artists were requested to create a portrait of the gallery owner Iris Clert. One artist, Robert Rauschenberg who left  things to the last minute decided to send a telegram to Iris saying "this is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so/Robert Rauschenberg." Clert, so it goes, in a fit of anger threw the telegram in the garbage only to reclaim it after reconsidering the audacity of the gesture and hung the telegram on the gallery wall with the other portraits. This was the sort of rupture in modernist thinking that has led us to constantly reevaluate what exactly a portrait is or is not as the function of portraiture was pushed into the foreground - beyond the subject.   "Nothing in a portr