"His humor is as brilliant as his color"
The fluid, transparent properties of watercolor combined with captivating visual storytelling — these are the things that inspire and motivate Daniel Powers.
He works on cold-press Arches, painstakingly glazing layer upon transparent layer until he achieves his desired result. Powers uses wet-in-wet techniques to describe volumes and establish visual hierarchies, recognizing that his method is nothing more than observed and controlled accidents.
Growing up in a family of storytellers (lovingly referred to as fibbers), Powers has always been drawn to narrative, whether implicit or explicit.
The visual story arcs of Thomas Hart Benton, Wanda Gág, Remedios Varo, as well as Golden Age illustrators Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, have laid the foundations for Powers's visual language.
Powers is a children's book illustrator and professor of illustration. His most recent paintings are visual responses to the verbal metaphors of poets including Connolly, Dickinson, Frost, Machado, Rilke and Whitman.