Extraction painting IV 2025 – 31,5 x 23,5cm, acrylic, pencil on canvas
Extraction Paintings
These paintings emerge from urgent, spontaneous acts, made in response to an accumulation of interconnected crises that refuse separation: Gaza, special economic zones, the systematic extraction of public wealth while services atrophy, governments operating with a lucrative opportunism that treats people and environment as finite economic units with no inherent value.
Working with subtle gradations of gray punctuated by heavier darks and dense impasto, the process itself enacts what it confronts. Extraction, repair, and balance occur simultaneously on the canvas—scraping away, building up, letting marks dissolve and weather. The thick accumulations of paint at the bottom edge suggest waste, residue, what remains after something has been taken. They refuse to disappear.
These are not illustrations of political concern but physical traces of grappling with it. The spontaneity is essential—it keeps a direct channel open between what is being carried internally and what materializes in paint. To plan too carefully would be to domesticate the urgency, to transform genuine response into representation.
The work holds contradictions: violence and care, weight and dissolution, destruction and regeneration. Gray tones shift quietly while dark matter accumulates with insistence. Vertical streaks weather and fade. The canvas itself frays at the edges. Nothing resolves cleanly because nothing in the world being responded to resolves cleanly.
In the act of painting, there is release—an inner extraction that parallels and counters the extractions happening in the world. These are painterly counteractions to a political status quo that consumes and discards. They are small, material acts of attention and presence against systems of systematic neglect.
David Powell, December 2025