Earth Door, Sky Door

Earth Door Sky Door

paintings of Mustang by

Robert Poweril

Serindia Publications

London, 1999

180 pp

ISBN 0 906026 53 9 

Robert Powell is an Australian architect who came to Kathmandu in 1980 and has lived here since, painting extremely realistic art based on Himalayan architecture. Recently, as part of the Nepal-German Project on High Mountain Archaeology, he was given the task of making technical drawings of buildings, cultural monuments and excavated sites of the Mustang region. The Mustang architecture and landscapes pictured here are a result of this work, as printed in the book Earth-Door-Sky-Door (1999). (Of the 43 colour plates in this 110-page book, 19 were being exhibited at the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, till September). The region of Mustang was kept off the map for international visitors, and with limited touristic interest among the Nepalis themselves, had been allowed to survive in isolation, behind the Annapurna massif at the headwaters of the Kali Gandaki River. While politically within Nepal, Mustang has an essentially Tibetan culture, whose guardian is the present Raja Jigme Parbal Bista, whose dynastic origins obviously trace back to the nomads who roamed the Chang Thang steppe. Powell deliberately does not provide context to his works. For example, he does not include the sky nor people in his compositions. As a reviewer in The Washington Post wrote about Powell's work, this lack of setting and context "has an almost hallucinatory impact". As another reviewer wrote, the buildings and walls are drawn "in such an animistic way that their walls heave with breath and flush with feeling, despite the superficial formality of Powell's inanimate subject matter".