Arthur Edward (Ted) Powell (born 1947) is a British-born advertising art director, landscape/cityscape artist and printmaker living in Melbourne Australia.
[3] Powell was born and raised in Neasden, a working-class suburb of London, the only son of an electrical engineer and his wife, a box assembler at National Cash Register (NCR) in Brent Cross.
[5][6] While Powell was a student at Ealing, he worked part-time as a cel painter on the 90-minute Beatles' animated movie Yellow Submarine (1968), designed by Heinz Edelmann and directed by George Dunning.
[15] Major brands were enamoured with music in advertising in the 1990s because of its ubiquity in consumer’s lives, and were aligning themselves with celebrity musicians, using them to endorse their products as a way of cutting through market clutter.
As regional (Asia) and later international creative director of the newly-formed Ford/JWT Global Business Unit (1995-2004), Powell collaborated with Melbourne-based British songwriter and music composer Danny Beckerman (1948-2006) to conceive and produce six songs as sound tracks for Ford television commercials between 1995-1999.
[29] The title of the work was a verbal pun on the environmental havoc caused by predominantly 'white' Australians discarding unwanted household items in suburban streets.
[30] A private commission of fifteen paintings on the theme of endangered forests in Australia for a prominent Riverina winery in 2006 sparked an interest in conservation, and concern about the impact excessive logging, road building and too frequent burning off was having on native animals.
His first urban landscapes or cityscapes were of Melbourne, and mostly around the industrial area near the Westgate Bridge that spans the Yarra River linking the east to the west of the city.
[32] The story of the collapse was far from fading in people's memory forty years on and Powell saw the anniversary as an opportunity to present the iconic bridge in new light.
He abstracted the city footprint further by superimposing the imprint of the street grid system first laid down by colonial surveyor and artist Robert Hoddle (1794–1881) in the 19th century over familiar landmarks created by later generations of town planners and architects, construction workers and engineers.
[43] Many of his sketchbooks predate the release of the online tool Google Street View by more than a decade yet appear to evoke the same pull and zoom effect created by the interactive technology.
He donated a painting to be auctioned at the Art for Life bush fire appeal, at the Melbourne Town Hall in 2009 to raise money for the rebuilding of communities tragically affected by the recent bushfires.
The proceeds from his paintings and others donated by colleagues respected and prominent in advertising and art helped Lighthouse continue to care for young people in need.