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Michael Powell’s paintings are particularly American. And in particular he is looking back

to his American childhood, using the experience of painting and the painting itself to evoke

the past in a way that is not possible with words. Instead he creates a language for these places
—one that speaks to the underside of the contemporary suburban experience.
~ Deborah Davidson

Twilight, or the “blue hour,” commemorates many contrasts: the colorful and the colorless, beauty and menace, the natural and the synthetic, life and death, heaven and earth. Informed by classical academic
traditions, my landscape paintings acknowledge the above with particular attention given to the most
fundamental and disparate of earthly contrasts: the light and the dark.

The Dark Pastoral paintings are meditations on the places where I have lived. These works invoke the power of loss and memory in the face of life’s brevity and impermanence. These are landscapes of mood, not of facts—silent places more felt than seen.