Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

  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