Each back the way he came 2026 – 24 x 18cm, acrylic, pencil on canvas
The title is from Beckett’s novel How It Is, and it describes a geometry of return: the path retraced, the journey reversed, each going back the way they came. Applied to a road it becomes something more specific and more painful, the road that was not retraced, the return that did not happen, the point at which the journey ended before the coming back was possible.
A black diagonal road cuts across the canvas from upper right to lower left, refusing the comfortable direction of a road going somewhere purposeful. It cuts. On either side, raised impasto ridges of grey, the texture of compacted aggregate, dried concrete, the material that accumulates at infrastructure’s edges, neither natural nor finished, the residue of the process that made the road possible. Beneath the grey ground, pencil marks arc and gesture through the paint: the drawing that preceded the surface, the planning that came before the laying, the record of what the road was before it became what it is.
Along the black road surface, four flowers have been placed. They are not growing here, they have been placed, deliberately, at intervals along the road’s length.
This substitution is the origin of the entire series. When Jean-Luc Godard described the flowers growing at the edges of motorways as roadside refugees, he identified the logic that David Powell’s flower paintings have been working through since 2013: that the ornamental and the dispossessed occupy the same marginal ground.
After the containers and extraction zones and geological overlays of the most recent works, this small painting goes back to where the series began: the road, the margin, the flower substituting the human figure.
The flowers do not witness from a distance here. They mark a specific point on a specific road. Each back the way he came. The flowers remain.