ABOUT
ROBERT
POWELL
Robert Powell was influenced by social anthropologist Alfred Gell’s theory that reaching a state of enchantment with the subject matter is the technology of inspiration through which art is created. Powell states that, “shamanism was the first technology of enchantment” and it was from that point of view that he first began to explore his sacred subjects set within the powerful landscapes of the Himalayas. Robert believed that after the European Enlightenment brought rationality and scientific explanation to the world, it became an essential function of art to “make the world strange again” and to allow people to view the world with the type of enchantment that one experiences as a child.
Born in Sydney, Australia in 1948, Rob was studying architecture when the Baul clan from the just divided state of Bengal in India, came to perform songs, dance and rituals in his university town.
This initial introduction to the human-spirit world deeply intrigued him, and the Bauls, who stayed at his home, recognised in him a kindred soul. Laxman Das Baul invited Rob to visit their Bengali village.
Arriving at the teeming Howrah train station, riding the branch line through idyllic rice paddies and ending with an hour-long rickshaw ride deeper into mud-walled thatch-roofed villages, the young man from ‘down under’ was transported into an utterly different reality.
In 2019 Andrei Jewell made the documentary, Enchanted Matter, capturing Rob’s life, art and philosophy.
Sadly his health gradually deteriorated. In December 2020, Rob passed away with Lieve at his side, in a room brightened by a view to a brilliant, orange-flowered tree, with music and candles to accompany his final journey.
Robert will not be forgotten. He will live on in our memories as a beloved, gentle being and a prodigious creator of wondrous works of art, who encouraged us to let the strange and beautiful lift us into enchantment.
Primarily an autobiographical film, contributions to Enchanted Matter are provided by interviews with those closest to Robert and his life’s work, including:
01
Author and ethnographic filmmaker Michael Oppitz who argues that a high quality drawing by a skilled draftsman can be a much more powerful illustrative tool for cultural documentation than a camera even in the age of high resolution digital photography.
Anthropolgist Charles Ramble PhD, Oxford who reveals how the ancient Himalayan cultures understood the sacred meaning of the natural color palette present in their environment and how rob incorporated that pigmentation into his creations…
02
03
Lieve Powell, Rob’s wife and muse, who provides insight into Powell’s deep passion for his art, the strong influence south Asian culture and architecture had on Robert and the way his extraordinary sensitivity was crucial to bringing the inanimate objects in his paintings to life.
REVIEW OF POWELL'S EXHIBITION AT THE SMITHSONIAN
...the images have an almost hallucinatory impact. A viewer cannot help but react to the lucidity of the vision…. Most of the images are stunningly strange, almost apparitional.
WASHINGTON POST
