PETER AND MADELINE POWELL

It's not often that two individual artists are able to combine and express their talents to produce a single body of work.  Peter and Madeline Powell have this rare creative alliance.  Essentially, painting is a solo endeavor, yet the Powells have accomplished a seamless blend of unity in their work.

Having met on Maui in 1976, they soon started working on each other’s artwork and before too long, it developed into a natural way of approaching and completing a painting for them.  "Life's treats and play things from the past and present are what we capture in our paintings.  We enjoy taking the little things out of everyday life and giving them the prominence and importance they had when we were children.  Our paintings invoke the childhood spirit that
everyday life has buried deep within us."

Peter and Madeline Powell are artists who have wed exacting technical photorealism to the sensual memories of one of childhood's most pleasurable activities: eating candy.  Not only getting it, but holding it, looking at it, and unwrapping it.  The smell, touch, shape, feel, and taste of it all come strikingly through the dramatically over-sized images of Hershey Kisses, Bazooka Bubble Gum, M&M's, and lollipops, to name a few.  Of course, the Powells have covered other subjects, most notably crayons, toys, cars, even florals and an occasional landscape.

THE  COLLABORATIVE  PROCESS

The Powells’ painting process is truly a collaborative partnership, with the razor edge detail in their paintings  becoming a gray fuzzy area when it comes to which one of them painted what part.  The gradual evolution of their combined skills started over 25 years ago, when they first discovered their synchronized vision.

Each painting starts with setting up and taking multiple reference photos of the subject matter.  They mostly choose to concentrate on close-up, “larger than life” images of everyday things.  At least two rolls of film per subject  (72+ photos) are shot, and the reference photos are then analyzed for composition, balance, and overall “theme” before the final image is selected. 

Peter and Madeline are both involved in the painstaking layout of each painting, which is completely laid out in graphite on the canvas in detail, showing the shadows and highlights, as well as the folds, crinkles, lettering and reflections.  The layout process can take several days, if not weeks as they play a kind of tag team with their graphite pencils.

After the composition is laid out, the actual painting process begins with the smooth layering of the base colors, which in some cases is done with an airbrush.  This allows for a very “flat” surface foundation without brush strokes.   Each color is masked off separately and then the lettering is usually painted in with fine sable brushes.  With the base colors and lettering complete, the shadows and reflections are painted in, followed by the highlights.

The Powells usually have several paintings in various stages of progress in the studio and literally “trade places”, moving from one painting to the next.  On the larger works, they often stand shoulder to shoulder, painting into the wee hours of the morning, fine-tuning the detail.

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