Steve Rhude
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A Place Called Away Steven Rhude: Living and Painting in Nova Scotia $60 "Rhude’s paintings take us away" Steven Rhude’s A Place Called Away is THE coffee table book of 2011 for proud Atlantic Canadians. The monograph is a lavish tribute to Rhude’s artistic eye. The selection and arrangement of the paintings, the typesetting, paper and binding are all of superb quality. Though perhaps not widely known outside the South Shore, Rhude’s work hangs in prominent hotels, municipal buildings and private collections throughout the Maritimes. One canvas can sell for thousands, but at a list price of $60 any art enthusiast can own an extensive series of mini-reproductions of all his most popular works and even some sketches from early in the artist’s career. Over coffee at the Wildwood Café in Bridgewater, Rhude talks about his inspiration for self-publishing the book through Manitoba-based printer Friesens. "To me, there’s two types of place," he says. "There’s a space with defined boundaries and there’s the other place — equally as important — an undefined place, a space that people go to when they write or paint. You can’t get there, to the creative place, unless you go to the tangible place first." Rhude says his writing instruction began early on at the Ontario College of Art and Design. "I remember this one professor I had. . . . He said, ‘Here’s your supplies list: a pair of hiking boots and a notepad. Go. Walk. I don’t want you to draw, I don’t want you to do anything. I just want you to write. About what you see. Interview people. Get something from that experience and bring it back to the class.’ "It was all preparation for the art. And I’ve always made notes ever since." The term magical realism as applied to visual arts designates a style that paints what the eye can see, representing mundane subject matter without sentimentalism or kitsch. The magic effect comes from intensity, which Rhude achieves using vibrant colours. "I get comparisons to (Alex) Colville, (Christopher) Pratt, Ian Blackwood, anyone who has a superficial association with Atlantic realism comes to people’s minds," he says. "But my work is quite divergent in mentality and technicality from theirs." While Colville prefers a pointillist technique (a method of oil painting developed by French neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat), Rhude’s approach is less controlled. He works out of the basement studio in his heritage Lunenburg home. "I splatter, flick paint, drip paint all over the canvas. You wouldn’t see that in the final stage but it’s there," Rhude says. "I move around the canvas. . . . It’s more of an unpremeditated way of working." Though Rhude’s work depicts everyday objects we’re used to seeing — buoys, dories and shorelines — it manages to transcend conventional iconography. Each object is, as Rhude himself writes, a "motif or element which bears witness" to the story of our Maritime lives. The paintings don’t possess the same undercurrent of menace that makes Colville’s work so well received, but the unsuspecting viewer may be surprised to learn of the genesis behind apparently innocuous scenes. A contentious 1995 meeting between co-op fishermen and local politicians in Canso inspired his Boat on a Road, a bold red dory lying across a strip of coastal highway. "I would never wake up and say, ‘I think I’ll put a boat on a road,’ " Rhude says of such inspiration. "It comes out of social experiences. If I hadn’t gone through those experiences, the paintings wouldn’t happen." Half of what makes a piece of art special is the process of creation, but it isn’t always obvious, standing in front of a finished painting, the hours of building, changing, pondering and dreaming involved. Viewers must take a painting at face value and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to Rhude. "I am not sold on the idea that the process is the only measurement — that arriving is nothing and the journey everything," he writes. "It is what you end up with that counts." But it does seem that by the artist sharing his dreaming and pondering, a casual observer can become an admirer; he or she is transformed into someone who understands the artistic process more fully, appreciates it more readily. A Place Called Away also acts as an art encyclopedia of sorts. Rhude’s series of shed paintings reference giants such as Mondrian, Rothko and Hopper, and leading the reader to these primary sources is one perhaps unintended benefit of such a book. Just as the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed art allows us to temporarily escape the endless strife of everyday living by providing a world of images and representations, Rhude’s art does indeed take us away — to a place of pure mental enjoyment. Megan Power has an MA in creative writing from Trinity College. She lives in Halifax. Stop by her blog: http://www.meganpower.blogspot.com/
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