Robert Powell and his Himalayan Art

By Amy Heller

Monk's quarters at Tsarang Gompa, Mustang By Robert Powell (b. 1948), 1998 Watercolour on paper Height 59 cm, width 135 cm Collection of Utpal Sen Gupta

The painter Robert Powell trained as an architect in his native Sydney and went on to study in Europe. After working in London designing modern architecture and Islamic gardens in Saudi Arabia, his wanderlust led him to the Himalayas, where he settled some 25 years ago. Tibetan architecture interested him greatly, but Tibet was closed to foreigners at that time. Instead, he went to Ladakh, at first recording the architecture through photographs and drawings. He subsequently sold his camera to finance his travels, and sketching and painting became the exclusive means by which he captured his impressions of the buildings, light and people of the region. Watercolour was his preferred medium, although he returned to photography for documentation purposes due to climate and light restrictions in areas such as Swat and Mustang. In Nepal, he collaborated on architectural projects in the Kathmandu valley. The Bhaktapur Development Project commissioned numerous drawings from him to record buildings and architectural details; he also designed greeting cards for the development project of the UNICEF paper factory in Bhaktapur. Subsequently, the Nepal German Project on High Mountain Archaeology hired him to document the architecture in Mustang.

When Powell travelled, he used small notebooks, but once he began work in the studio, he adopted a larger scale and produced highly detailed work. The results of his unique and exceptional perspective - 142 paintings and sketches - are now on view in the first retrospective exhibition of his work at the Ethnographic Museum of Zurich University. The selection covers landscapes, architectural studies, local inhabitants - both human and animal - and ethnographic subjects such as jewellery and costume, ritual tools, and agricultural devices. In many of these paintings, one is struck by the treatment of light and shadow. The colours of the sky and land are crystalline and starkly pure, as if the rarefied air and light at 4,000 metres have been brought into the museum. The alternation between the minimalism seen in the sculptural mass of the buildings and the high detail of decorative woodwork in windows and columns create a strong impact. The broad planes of colour on the facades of buildings are sculpturally modelled by light and shadow. As with Albrecht D�rer's beetle or hare, there is a conscious combination of realism with the aesthetic immanence of the subject, whether alive or inanimate.

Through his selective shading and composition, Powell's draughtsmanship reveals both the concrete and the immaterial. Thus enhanced by the skill of the artist, these traditional objects and buildings reflect the eternal grandeur and beauty of the Himalayas. This is especially evident in his painting of a school in Chabahil, Kathmandu, of which Roberto Vitali remarked: `My wife is particularly fond of a painting in which an awkward facade, actually three facades in one, takes on a quality of pure abstraction.' It was, in fact, a pathetic little concrete building, the product of random construction in an undeveloped courtyard. As painted by Powell, however, the school has been removed from its urban context. Isolated and rendered in subtle colours and shading, it conveys a sense of affinity with classical architectural proportions and elegance, recalling arcades in Rome. Powell candidly describes his art in an interview included in the exhibition catalogue, where several essays by noted scholars examine his work and the questions it raises. Peter Herbstreuth has provided a biographical essay and reflects on Powell as a 20th century artist. Niels Gutschow discusses Powell's capacity to provide measured, realistic documentation as well as what Powell terms `imaginary documentation' to describe his personal view of objects and landscape.

Using pencil alone on textured paper, the drawing of the Licchavi chaitya (stupa) conveys the varied surface textures of three kinds of stone, which are the result of a reconsecration of the stupa in the mid-17th century, combining elements of two different 7th century stupas. Thus the drawing reveals the hidden history of the sculpted stones. Gotz Hagmuller's essay `Fact and Fiction' discusses a group of paintings of purely imaginary subjects, all of which are illustrated (although they are not included in the exhibition). Here Powell takes animate and inanimate elements of the Himalayas - trees, horns, facades, arches, towers - and merges them in paintings rich in colour and with unusual subjects. Clare Harris and Heather Stoddard examine Powell's work in Ladakh: Harris evaluates his distinctive contribution to the corpus of illustrations of the region, while Stoddard explains the cultural context of his subjects. Charles Ramble focuses on Powell's Mustang collection, which is particularly strong. In some Mustang temples where photography is prohibited, Powell has seen and documented ancient paintings of Tibetan Buddhism which show uncanny qualities of abstraction, hitherto almost unsuspected in the broad sphere of later Tibetan art. Annegret Nippa studies Powell's work in Swat, in particular the mosque at Gabral Jaba. Michael Oppitz concludes the essay section in `Drawing or Photograph', which reviews Powell's work over the years of their collaboration in several regions in terms of the ethnographic necessity of documenting traditional ways of life, which are constantly in flux. Oppitz concludes that both drawing and photography are essential. In addition to the essay illustrations, the finely produced plates on buff-coloured paper allow the reader to appreciate the paintings individually, each identified by title. The captions are placed at the end of the volume, which permits the luxury of looking at the plate and separately apprehending the dimensions and explanation of the subject. The volume forms an eloquent - and elegant - testimony to Robert Powell and his works.