Morning is at hand 2026 – 18 x 24cm, acrylic on canvas
The title comes from Samuel Beckett, as do nearly all the titles in the flower series, a genealogy that is neither incidental nor merely literary. Beckett’s language is the series’ tuning fork: precise, stripped, resistant to consolation, alive to the comedy of persistence. “Morning is at hand” carries the ambiguity Beckett perfected, announcement and irony held in the same breath.
Morning arrives. Whether that constitutes good news remains open.
The painting is small. At 18 × 24cm it fits in two hands, which is significant: its subject is the intimate embedded in the vast. To the left of the canvas, two flowers appear anchored side by side. The slow human traffic of the city passes them in both directions, continuous and indifferent.
Formally, the painting applies the series’ characteristic structural logic. A deep forest green occupies the upper left triangle, flat and acrylic and absolute, the colour of public spaces managed to within an inch of their wildness. A heavy diagonal cuts across the canvas, below which the lower right is occupied by an impasto of extraordinary density: built-up black paint, textured, almost carbonised, protruding from the surface like asphalt that has been excavated rather than laid. Between these two zones, the administered green above, the dark geological matter below, runs the inhabited band: the boulevard, the tracks, the canal edge, rendered in pale and provisional marks that suggest both fresco and erasure.
In this middle zone the flowers appear, as they always do in this series, in the space that remains. A pink tulip, upright and singular, holds its position near the left of the band. Beside it, lower, a red bloom — looser, less resolved. Beyond them, in the rightward distance, ghost-like figures at the water’s edge, rendered with just enough paint to confirm their presence. The two flowers which subsitute an otherwise human presence occupy the same precarious ledge, that the city plans its surfaces around them without planning for them.
The excess materiality of what lies beneath the flowers and passing ghost forms is a black/green impasto in the lower register which is neither shadow or water. It is the underside of the boulevard, the infrastructure that the new paving conceals, the substrate that the tidying-up requires you not to see. Powell has been digging at this in his most recent paintings: the Implacable Cries, and the geological strata of She Wakes in the Night.
In Morning is at Hand the excavation is most compressed. The canvas is small, the contrast absolute. The flowers persist on their narrow ledge between the administered surface and what the surface is built on.