Arthur Ted Powell

Australia from an outsider's view became a major theme in his landscapes and cityscapes. His early style was representational and later became more experimental and abstracted.

At the time, Powell's work was strongly influenced by two well-known Australian landscape artists. The first was Australian painter and printmaker Fred Williams (1927–1982) who Powell never met and whose method he adopted of reworking the same motif a number of times in different mediums and over a number of years. The other was Clifton Pugh AO (1924–1990) who Powell accompanied on a three-week painting trip to the Kimberley Ranges in Western Australia in 1989. It was under Pugh's influence and tutelage he first painted the unique landscape of Outback Australia. In 2005, he went back to the Kimberley Ranges to camp and paint the landscape for three weeks and find a new direction for his art.[27][28]

Between 2007 and 2009, his focus shifted from landscapes to more social and political themes across a variety of mediums, genres and styles, including portraiture and installation. White Trash was a multimedia installation created out of discarded factory-made household objects found on the streets near his home and studio over a three-week period in 2007, and was part of a group exhibition on the theme of 'Contamination' (2007) at Gasworks Arts Park, Albert Park, Victoria.[29] The title of the work was a verbal pun on the environmental havoc caused by predominantly 'white' Australians discarding unwanted household items in suburban streets. When asked if the assemblage of white and white painted found objects, including an old car bonnet, bedheads, cigarettes and discarded electrical items was a work of art, Powell described it as more of an expression of an appalling sense of waste in contemporary consumer society. When the exhibition ended, the installation was disassembled and the objects taken to the council waste facility in nearby Port Melbourne for disposal.[30]

A private commission of fifteen paintings on the theme of endangered forests in Australia for a prominent Riverina winery in 2006 sparked an interest in conservation, and concern about the impact excessive logging, road building and too frequent burning off was having on native animals. This culminated in a joint exhibition of animal portraits, titled Poetic Fauna, in 2009 with fellow Briton, writer and poet Bryan S. Cooper. As migrants to Australia in the 1970s, their view was that most animals unique to Australia were either cherished as national symbols or considered dangerous and generally treated badly by humans. The poems that accompanied the paintings, sketches and mono prints used the 'voice' of the animals themselves as a form of protest against their treatment.[31]

The city of Melbourne had a profound effect on Powell's work and became the primary motif from 2009 onwards. His first urban landscapes or cityscapes were of Melbourne, and mostly around the industrial area near the Westgate Bridge that spans the Yarra River linking the east to the west of the city. Fred Williams had produced a group of four large strip format gouache-on-paper paintings called the West Gate Bridge series showing the half-constructed bridge in 1970, and had planned to paint the length of the river but he lost heart in the project after a section of the bridge collapsed on 15 October 1970, while it was still under construction, killing thirty-five workers.[32] The story of the collapse was far from fading in people's memory forty years on and Powell saw the anniversary as an opportunity to present the iconic bridge in new light.[33][34][35]

Maps had been a recurring theme in Powell's work since his art school days at Ealing Art College. In the mid-Sixties, they took the form of diagrams and maps that bore some semblance to 'mind maps' and structural systems that figured in Roy Ascott's teaching. In paintings exhibited between 2011 and 2018, Powell re-imagined his adopted hometown using grid-like structures and abstract shapes that resembled maps.[36] It had been announced in the local news media that Melbourne was set to become Australia's biggest city by 2035 years[37] and Powell felt a sense of urgency to capture the visual essence of the city footprint as the city grew and evolved. In these works he tilted Melbourne's urban landscape full against the picture plane in a style reminiscent of not only his early student work but indigenous Australian art. He abstracted the city footprint further by superimposing the imprint of the street grid system first laid down by colonial surveyor and artist Robert Hoddle (1794–1881) in the 19th century over familiar landmarks created by later generations of town planners and architects, construction workers and engineers.

Powell placed great importance on drawing and produced many preparatory sketches and drawings for later works in panorama sketchbooks and long concertina notebooks at his studio, on the streets and in cafes near his inner city home and in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand where he had lived, using simple drawing tools and palette. His visual documentation of Melbourne streets has been compared to that of early pioneer Wilbraham Liardet (1799-1878), an Australian hotelier, water-colour artist and historian, who was responsible for the early development of Port Melbourne. Sketchbooks tracing the development along the Port Phillip Bay foreshore and capturing the precise layout of the streets of South Melbourne, Port Melbourne and Albert Park are part of the City of Port Phillip Collection.[38][39] Sketchbooks of Melbourne are also held in the State Library of Victoria's rare books collection [40][41][42] and City of Melbourne collection.[43] Many of his sketchbooks predate the release of the online tool Google Street View by more than a decade yet appear to evoke the same pull and zoom effect created by the interactive technology.[44]