Steven Rhude
Artist's Statement
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In general I have pursued my art with a focus on my immediate environment. This, in a regional and physical sense would be the coastal communities of Nova Scotia. However, I use this premise as a means to identify with the social and poetic nature of two concurrent art practices of the Twentieth century, Realism and Modernism. Both movements have had strong advocates and artists in remote and urban regions throughout Canada.
In one way I’ve been drawn to the social upheaval brought on by the transition in the fisheries and the resulting out migration of coastal communities in the Atlantic provinces. Art movements such as the American school of realism prevalent in 1930's, resulting from the depression and the labour movement, manifested because of social and political concerns. The Ashcan school and regionalist painters are prime examples. Their art portrayed the division between capital and labour with a stylistically modified realism which had a broad public appeal to both urban and rural dwellers. It is in this sense that I am indebted to their art. Canada has also had a healthy tradition of artists representing similar concerns. The Maritimes have had a long and peppered history of social and labour upheaval.
Within the movement of Canadian modernism, some artists outside of abstraction were considered imagists. The school of Atlantic realism extolled these virtues . Though realist in category, they abstracted their work through composition and stylistic techniques to create a tension between the abstract and the representational, hence their popular appeal. My own interest in iconic structures like the fishing shed, the dory, coastal roads, and sculptural objects with a functional use such as the fishing buoy, link the vernacular with the modern. It is through the use of these objects pictorially that I have sustained an interest in the ethos of coastal communities.
An ongoing project of mine has been the use of the three primary colours in a pictorial format. Ironically, since encountering a history of the exhibition of Aleksandr Rodshenko’s three red, yellow and blue monochromes, and considered by the critic Nikolay Tarabukin to be the "last paintings", I have long mused on this proclamation. Here in Nova Scotia the demise of painting was profiled at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Along with Gary Neill Kennedy, college president, a strong conceptualist curriculum was established in the early 70's advocating the dematerialization of the art object. A classic struggle ensued within those artists sensitive to the tangible qualities of painting but disliking the bourgeois associations historically connected with the profession. A need to reinvent painting soon arose within the college. Concurrent with this artistic and cultural polemic was the environmental devolution of the fisheries affecting first
hand, the communities outside the city of Halifax. It seems more than just painting was dying in Nova Scotia.I have no such need to mentally reinvent painting or question its materiality. I’m comfortable pushing against the confines of a two dimensional surface. One of the principal catalysts of my road paintings was a need to create a sign post, a dramatic and metaphorical clash uncommon to the contemporary traveler or viewer.
Though implausible, my road paintings have as part of their composition a reliance on large shapes in the form of buildings, objects, water, roads etc,. I use large shapes to ensure clarity and simplicity. They encompass tragedy, comedy, human feeling and human drama, the simple expression of a complex situation. My road paintings depict objects and architecture common to the Maritimes for the last three to four hundred year. They show a concern for the forces shaping and misshaping the contemporary coastal community. The plain modernism of fishing architecture instills in me the physical glory of existence, albeit in a period when it seems ambivalence shrouds our sense of loss, that is, a loss for history and tradition in these virtual times.
