High Country, by Alex Stone: at Waiheke Community Art Gallery

By JANET HUNT

Last November, when artist-writer Alex Stone became a participant in the Department of Conservation's Wild Creations artists' residency programme, he signed on for two weeks alone in the South Marlborough high country. He knew then only that a sojourn in this bleak and beautiful landscape with its dark and often bitter history, had immense appeal.

"This site had long attracted me, from maps, from stories, from the windows of planes. I looked at the landscape below and longed, always, to be in it," he says.

The Sedgemere Hut, which was his base, is on the Awatere faultline and overlooks a long valley dotted with subsidence lakes. Nearby, the Wairau River turns away from the fault and flows north through the mountains to Blenheim. The skyline is a fringe of mountain peaks. Across the valley are the abandoned buildings of the Tarndale homestead, now part of Molesworth Station. Farming here has always been marginal, often futile. The weather is harsh and unpredictable - dry dust one day, deep snow the next.

Stone departed for his stay not knowing what to expect, although there was always the possibility, in the best Romantic tradition, that the communion of solitary artist with wild and primal landscape might bring about an epiphany. It was not to be: there were no sudden awakenings or dramatic insights, but Stone was not disappointed. He felt instead a quiet and steadying confidence, a confirmation that his direction was the right one.

Stone's passion is abstracted line - cartoon and map-like, calligraphic, fluid and fluent and often rhythmic, almost musical.

Drawing inspiration from the cave drawings of his childhood home in South Africa, he paints in muted earth tones, rich ambers, tans and blacks counterpointed with red and slashes of white.

His works are usually large and on Gib wallboard, supplied by his major sponsor, Winstone Wallboards.

Despite their apparent invitation to literal or constructed meaning, his works always tantalisingly, sometimes frustratingly, elude interpretation.

High Country, for all that it largely continues this obsession, does offer new possibilities. Although Stone wrote, sketched and photographed while at Sedgemere, the 19 pieces in the show at the Waiheke Community Art Gallery have been, with one exception, completed since his return.

They are consequently mediated, long-distance responses to his experience of Sedgemere. And in retrospect, it was above all, sounds rather than forms, which returned to Stone - echoes, the rumble of a wind-whipped river, the song of skylarks, the distant thunder of jets overhead, reminding him of his other world, and at night, under snow in the hut, silence so dense as to be almost palpable.

High Country contains trademark Stone pieces such as, "Skylarks return to song with exultant haste after each flurry of snow has passed."

Stone uses new, brighter colour, a green, flame-like broad-brushed mound creating a horizon above which a series of black, loose and open rectangular forms are suspended, abstracted skylark melodies, each with a series of pink squiggles escaping through the openings in the line.

To call it "abstract" or "figurative" is perhaps inappropriate - more, it resembles a dance or a musical score, a response or description of an event in line and motion.

In addition to this broader palette, there is also a wider range of media: sketches on paper under glass, works on board and canvas, and smaller pieces than in the past.

My pick for the show is Surprise the Mountain, a piece Stone confesses to finding a little unsettling. It is mixed media on unframed canvas and crackles with energy, is more active than descriptive and creates an event in itself.

Heavy brush-strokes in bitter pink suggest a mountainscape, a forbidding dense mass above signals unease - an impending storm perhaps - and a ragged and tossed blue splashes the foreground. Agitated pencil marks overscore all. It's adventurous, a little different.

Perhaps there was no epiphany, though a change could be on the horizon.

* The exhibition runs until June 18