Earth
Door Sky Door: The Mustang Paintings of Robert Powell Architectural paintings in
watercolour from the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang in northern Nepal by Robert Powell are
the subject of a major travelling exhibition. The landscape of Mustang is stripped of
comfort, dry, windblown, dramatic and overwhelming in scale. Yet with the careful control
of water, man-made islands of subsistence arose in remote corners. The structures man
builds to maintain these islands, and to thrive, are the subjects of these paintings.
Virtually every built object in Mustang bears the signs of ritual activity: from
prehistoric hand-dug cave systems to ruined hilltop castles, from densely clustered
villages to isolated temples, from propitiatory stacks of yak horns to the sophisticated
cosmology of the chorten. Paperback (March
1999)
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