For well over three decades Philadelphia-based artist, Mike Powell, maintained a successful practice as a graphic designer, product designer and illustrator, receiving multiple awards from the Society of Illustrators, NY and Communication Arts Magazine. During this time he blended a professional career in the applied arts with duties as a full-time professor at The Art Institute of Philadelphia and as a landscape painter.

A decision to wholly engage in his art led Powell to relocate to Los Angeles in 2013. These new environs inspired in him a fresh response to the landscape impulse to include subjects of identity and place, loss and memory, and the junction of the natural and synthetic. The culmination of this inquiry is presented in a body of thematically diverse paintings and mixed media works entitled, The Dark Pastoral.

Powell is a graduate of Vermont College and has an MFA in Visual Art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. He now lives in Pennsauken, New Jersey near the Cooper River and is a principal in Western Collective in Philadelphia.