Steven Rhude - Paintings/Drawings

Study of Dante, Graphite on paper, Florence, Steven Rhude   “You shall leave everything loved most dearly, and this is the shaft of which the bow of exile shoots first. You shall prove how salt is the taste of another man’s bread and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs." Dante - Paradisio   Around the time of Beatrice’s death, Dante began to immerse himself in the study of philosophy and the machinations of the Florentine political scene. Florence was then was a tumultuous city, with factions representing the papacy and the empire continually at odds, and Dante held a number of important public posts. In 1302, however, he fell out of favor and was exiled for life by the leaders of the Black Guelphs (among them, Corso Donati, a distant relative of Dante’s wife), the political faction in power at the time and who were in league with Pope Boniface VIII. (The pope, as well as countless other figures from Florentine politics, finds a place...

Ochre Pit Road, o/p. 24" x 24", $3,000.00, Steven Rhude “Like most of us, I assume that there is a real world out there—but that our representations of that world are constructions. People create and apply these constructions in a struggle to grasp the world, relate to it, and manipulate it through concepts, knowledge, and acts. In the process, reality impinges; and the events that occur consequently are not predicated on the cultural system of representations employed by the people, although they may largely be interpretable within it. A people’s way of life is thus not a closed system, contained within their own cultural constructions. That part of the real world on which we as anthropologists need to focus is composed of this wid- est compass: a natural world, a human population with all its collective and statistical social features, and a set of cultural ideas in terms of which these people try to understand and cope with themselves and their habitat.” ...

Poacher's Signal, oil on panel, 24" x 24", $3,000.00, Steven Rhude, Harvest Gallery Poaching was, and probably still is an underground pass time in many parts of the Atlantic provinces. Without naming names, I recall some locals in my past who did it just for "the devil of it", while others did it for more obvious reasons. Once a poor man's food, lobster now is synonymous with an expensive habit and a lucrative industry with exports all over the world. Every time I see someone purchasing some lobsters prior to a flight somewhere, I'm reminded of poachers I knew using bicycle wheels to trap lobster, or just diving in wet suits to return to the surface with a prize specimen. They still had to be careful of the watchful eye of Department of Fisheries and Oceans though, so signals were sometimes used in a two man operation when setting up an underground expedition for the big prize.  Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

Acadian Spring, 36" x 48", oil on canvas,sold "The estuarine environment is characterised by having a constantly changing mixture of salt and freshwater, and by being dominated by fine sedimentary material carried into the estuary from the sea and from the rivers, which accumulates to form mudflats... estuaries have been claimed to be amongst the most productive natural habitats in the world... [they] are transition zones between rivers and the sea..." Donald S. Mclusky, from the Estuarine Ecosystem This painting will be exhibited at the Harvest Gallery on June 13th, 2015 with the theme pertaining to Realism. Please contact Harvest Gallery, Wolfville - 902.542.7093 Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

‘Looking at the Masters’       Acadia University Art Gallery Oil Painting Class with Steven Rhude June 2nd to July 21st (Tuesdays, 7- 9pm)                                                                 Buoys and Girl with Pearl Earing, o/c This eight week workshop examines Western Master works through the lens of psychology and techniques inherent in the tradition of representational painting. Using photographic sources, our purpose is to develop the ability to see, perceive, inscribe, and translate experience as it relates to  a master work of the student’s choice. By selecting a work to copy, the student will learn to build a stretcher ...

Ram Island Ledge Light, o/c, 36" x 60, private collection Study for Ram Island Ledge Light, graphite, 16" x 24", p/c Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

Study of a Young Woman, conte, 20" x 15", Steven Rhude Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS