Arousels
The fifteen paintings and one sculpture that comprise this latest Powditch exhibition reflect his continued fascination, perhaps obsession, with the depicting of the female nude. Pewditch has pursued this theme of a headless female torso cut off at the upper thighs since the early '70s and possibly earlier. His career has been based in Sydney where he exhibited regularly with Rudy Komon and over the past several years with Ray Hughes in Brisbane on an equally consistent basis.
The circle closed, so to speak, with Ray Hughes' acquisition of Rudy Komon Gallery and last year Hughes held a Powditch retrospective of work of the last ten years. In an interview in The Bulletin on September 17, 1985, Hughes was reported to consider Pewditch "one of the most underrated artists in Australia". One might dismiss such a claim as pure dealer's hype, but Hughes is not known to take on board artists unless he passionately believes in them.
Powditch teaches in the School of Design at the Sydney College of the Arts, and his work flirts dangerously with the slick and superficial qualities of commercial art. If Powditch used the commercial art look in order to subvert it, (e.g. Tom Wesselman's nudes) his work would probably gain acceptance for its seriousness and nobility of intention.
Powditch, though doesn't give us that morally satisfying out, his work is unashamedly sensuous - hedonistic, "design" qualities are exploited, not subverted. Style and subject matters therefore combine to block any ideologically satisfying appreciation for his work.
In purely visual terms, Powditch concedes little. Abstract and semi-abstract figures, soil pastel colours with a partiality to decorator pink, applied in soft brush strokes, or dabbed, or sprayed