Artist Michael Powell captures Hawaii landscapes with palette knife paintings

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Michael Powell is a longtime Honolulu artist known for capturing the beauty of the islands in his work.

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“I found, after living in Hawaii these many, many years, the art that seems to endure are landscape paintings. They go back generations of people who have created beautiful landscapes over time,” Powell said.

Powell’s paintings don’t involve a brush — he prefers a palette knife.

“This (palette knife) is the only thing I use to create all this. If you look at the sky, you can see it’s so smooth. You don’t see brush strokes,” he said.

“I think the islands are so unique, to capture it on a canvas as time goes forward, really is capturing something that’s timeless. It doesn’t come in and out of fashion. It’s not in vogue or out of vogue. Landscapes just endure,” he added.

Powell credits his work to his mentor and partner in art, the late Hiroshi Tagami, who Powell says taught him everything he knows.

“Many years ago, Hiroshi said, I’m going to give you your first lesson. I’m going to take a glass ball and roll it against a log as though it’s on the beach, and I want you to paint this. I thought, how can I paint glass? I worked on this for five days, very slowly. And so this is my very first painting,” he said.

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Powell took what he learned, and from a simple painting of a glass ball against a log to multicolor landscapes, Powell has found a new student to pass on what he learned from his mentor: up-and-coming artist Dan de Castro.

“For someone who had not painted before in his lifetime, this illustrates that within all of us, we have this capacity,” Powell said.

Powell has sold more than 5,000 paintings since he began his career as an artist, but said sales don’t influence his paintings.

“I think the world is very busy and full of stress. When you come home, if you can walk into your home and see a painting like this, and it makes you do this,” Powell said, taking a deep breath, “then that’s what I want to achieve for people.”

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