Sax Impey's 'The Boatman Calls' Opens At Anima Mundi
Not surprisingly, Sax Impey’s major current solo exhibition of paintings, ‘The Boatman Calls’, has been greeted with an incredible response from our visitors to the opening on Friday, 8th September.
As ever the basis for Impey’s work is his personal experience as a mariner, but this exhibition sees the imagery become increasingly and overtly allegorical and cautionary. A poetic narrative composed by Impey, forms the narrative thread to the exhibition:
"A dream it seemed to me, a night so cold trees turned to white before my eyes.
Frost rimed the land and air, and the ancient tree.
Waters rose, and perceiving Reason’s noble visage drowning neath the waves, we took ship to ride out the storm... returned light displayed the uppermost boughs of mighty trees piercing the surface of dark waters... from the sky without a sound a lance of flame, and neath there jiggered sabbath shapes.
Abandoned Babel, submerged in evening depths... and a solitary boatman, dark before a setting sun, approaches on a sea of glass, and sounds a final horn... the boatman calls…”
Of the origins of this visionary text Impey states; "Like the desert, where religions form, the open ocean asks of the imagination a narrative. Observations on my journeys hinted at the fragments of a story... another story, or perhaps another’s story... It seemed to me I garnered traces, or echoes of it, on a white winters night in England, in Biscay, and in the waters of the Mediterranean on a voyage which turned out to be the last I would ever make with Trevor Vincett, a friend and mentor over so many ocean miles. This exhibition is dedicated to his memory”
Impey’s mastery of the sea continues to captivate and enthrall but more notably ‘The Boatman Calls’ can be read as a quietly but no less emphatically pertinent call to arms. There is a profound sense of surrendering to a story that may have now already been told, but within these glassy passages there remains space for contemplation, where we are compelled to examine ourselves, perhaps in that we are offered a glimmer of hope.
To view the exhibition click the link below:
