The History of Anchors the Poetics of Departure by Alex Stone in Auckland

2003 Acrylic on canvas This is part of a series using explanation marks as painterly devices in Alex’s exploration and expansion of a narrative of line These explanation marks dominate like islands in a sea of white To the left red gestural marks on matte black act as an organic foil and prelude to prepare the eye The white horizontal exclamation mark directs the narration This opening visual sequence reminds of night sea voyages of heightened anticipation where the eye strains for sense in the shards of moonlight Despite the narrative that one would like to impose it is a story about marks Thousands of exclamation marks ghost the surface They form horizontal movement through the black ground and vertical movement through the white ground in durational currents Unpainted canvas intersects both movements and leaches a transition from prelude to the main event At first glance the predominant plane looks like a static composition of black on white It is not As we visually move across these custom designed exclamation marks we realise an animation in the mind The dots are off centre This offset effect disrupts our preconceptions and moves the marks to an expectant space between arrival and destination This is a tightly controlled and thoughtful work of interesting and endless complications A poem attends to this work The history of anchors the poetry of departures An island an its shadow did dance a line of thought The wind blew along along a longer time re arranging re appraising and re acquainting them as fixes do definitions of a journey And to you and I they said the island and its shadow with the colour of midnight water whispering behind us “Between the point of arrival-and-departure and the action of the sames there exists an exquisite poetry of expectation punctuated with charged space into which gestures half-made and un-made and occasionally complete settle silently like silt until the coast is clear again