edwardpovey
edwardpoveyquotations
Wow. Otto Dix eat your heart out!
Anne Bobby - Actress, New York
"Edward's art is as emotionally fearless as it is visually breathtaking."
Anne Bobby - screen and stage actress, ‘Born on The Fourth of July’ Tom Cruise, Oliver Stone
"You don't need to see Povey's work hanging on a wall to receive its power and sense of theatre: it hangs in your memory too."
Cefin Roberts - Artistic Director of the Welsh National Theater
...deeply disturbing: along the lines of the crucifixion and the acrobat. Not easy to live with or work on. Oh my goodness, these are really unhinging in their commitment to pigment. Very "painterly" painting. I see the figure-study marionette makes a reappearance, nice, a Povey icon. Your work seems to be moving in a Belgian direction, echoes of Egon Schiele. I like.
Speaking of deconstructed sexuality, i saw the two Balthus “Therèse dreaming" and “Therèse awake" at the Met recently and they are quite a double whammy in their disturbing frankness and cool eroticism (though, thanks to the Met's fidelity to the idea of housing bequests in the context of their collectors rather than their oeuvre, the two Therèses hang in separate rooms). What struck me about them, seeing them with new eyes in a new city, was the way their very European-ness seems to subvert, even debauch, American ideas of innocent preteen fervour from the same period in exactly the same way Nabakov does, by camping it on the one hand while regarding it with langour and sophisticated coolness on the other. What i mean is, that the paintings, simply by hanging in America, are making a comment on that nations attitudes to sexuality.
Hugh Featherstone - Songwriter-singer, Belgium
"Defining proportions, setting boundaries, exploring context: Povey's craft is to do for the mind what the Italian renaissance did for the body."
Hugh Featherstone - Songwriter-singer, Belgium
"A larger than life man in a shrinking world."
"Our Edward is still wrestling with his angels and his demons. I'm not sure who will win, but I know the paintings will be great!"
Hugh Featherstone 2008 - Songwriter-singer, Belgium
"Edward Povey’s art communicates a very real message about the human condition in a way which makes you re-examine the conventions of the visible world. Strikingly, his refusal to accept convention in the work is matched by an equally unconventional approach to presenting it. "
Huw Roberts - former head of BBC Wales
"An Edward Povey hangs in my living room and every day I am reminded of his originality, his beauty, and the eternal promise of his craft."
Kate Mulgrew - Actress
Your new paintings are very interesting. they're a departure from the work you've created before. I'd say many of these new works are bound for museums. My world is enriched beyond words with you in it.
Ken Owen - Art collector and playwright, Wales
Truly frightening. Please remove us from your list.
L.M., Austin, TX
"Edward Povey makes work which challenges our pre-conceived ideas of the human condition. He removes layer after layer of unnecessary veneer to create images which overflow with universal meaning and of cultural and artistic value."
Paul Islwyn Thomas - former head of Arts for the BBC 2006
"The tradition of Figurative Symbolism reflects the two things most enduringly fascinating to humanity. That is, humanity and meaning."
Povey
Povey's current approach: "Influences informed by Visions"
"So take Paula Rego's boisterous meticulousness - the large-limbed people with heavy Celtic heads and mad eyes. But use Rivera's unexpected "Spencer" reaches - quite unabashed to make a good composition. See the large-limbed reaching mad Celts. Reaching and turning. Now be prepared to introduce good color, with the altered color of Hicks-Jenkins and Bo Bartlett - except using R.B.Kitaj' s fauve emphasis on color - where he loses edges and runs color from thing to thing so inappropriately and so dreamily. And like Kitaj - lay in fogs of color like "flown clouds", dropped between characters on the stage. And this is a stage.
But now what vision informs it all? I do see a tan stage of wood and canvas, and big stuffed 1920's armchairs, but I also see the lilac and scarlet clouds flown in, and Balthus now opening the thighs of a private world."
Povey
"Edward Povey's art communicates that the body language of the characters he depicts is so intense, emotional and surreal that they make you curious to see much more of his work."
Xaviera Hollander - Sex Icon, author and subject of "The Happy Hooker", and many other titles. 2009