"Only the ones in our minds."

                                                     Hermit at Lobster Cove, oil on canvas, 36" x 36", Steven Rhude

"Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.

— LD

"I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory."

— Justine

"With the passing of years he has had ample time to reflect; he’s a hermit still, raising the child in comfortable solitude."
— Description of Darley in Clea

He left the lighthouse at Lobster Head Cove and descended down a rocky bank to the beach. Remote and turned over daily by the Atlantic, there is no logic amongst the stones to hang onto, No people either.

 

He  remarked to no one in general that there are no hermits on the western shore of Newfoundland, a cheeky counterpoint to the image of a lone man posing before a bleached structure. It was organic, and cobbled together for a summer before the storms and tides took away any evidence of it, or its creator -  nonetheless, it existed as some kind of habitation that made no sense to a city across the sea, an abstraction of bones and wood.   

"Only the ones in our minds." came a response.

It got him thinking about things like - where is this happening? or, is this work about memory, and if so is it collapsing into itself? Solitude, like memory isn't chronological - it's tangled and can defy time. Like a painting you can see any part of it , or all of it. 

Later on back in the studio his son took a picture of him as a hermit for the painting... the only one in his mind.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS