Arthur Edward (Ted) Powell (born 1947) is a British-born advertising art director, landscape/cityscape artist and printmaker living in Melbourne Australia. In 1999, he conceived and directed Ford Global Anthem, the Ford Motor Company's first global television advertising campaign.Simison, Robert, 'Ford debut ad at same time globally', The Wall Street Journal, 27 October 1999, B10.Elliot, Stuart, 'Ford Goes Global in Effort to Control the Clock', The New York Times, 27 October 1999, 13–14. At the beginning of the 21st century, the commercial was believed to be the world's biggest advertisement.BBC GMR Drivetime, 2 November 1999, 18:00, World's biggest advertisement, presenter Tony Barnes.
Early life and education
Powell was born and raised in Neasden, a working-class suburb of London, the only son of an electrical engineer and his wife, a box assembler at National Cash Register (NCR) in Brent Cross. He was educated at John Kelly Boys' Technology College (now Crest Boys' Academy) in Neasden.
Powell studied Fine Art and Advertising Design at Ealing Art College in West London from 1963 to 1968. He was a student in Roy Ascott's experimental 'Groundcourse', a method as influential as it was unorthodox in its approach to teaching art.Hodgkinson, Will, 'So, what did you learn at school today?', The Guardian UK Sunday 19 April 2009. Retrieved 1 September 2014. The radical curricula and behaviourist experiments at Ealing between 1961 and 1964 made it one of the most controversial art courses in the history of British art education.Pethick, Emily, 'Degree Zero'. Frieze magazine, Issue 101, September 2006.Bracewell, Michael, 2007, Re-make/Re-model – Art, Pop, Fashion and the making of Roxy Music, 1953–1972, Faber & Faber, 195–208,
While Powell was a student at Ealing, he worked part-time as a cel painter on the 90-minute Beatles' animated movie Yellow Submarine (1968), designed by Heinz Edelmann and directed by George Dunning.Yellow Submarine (1968), Full Cast & Crew, imdb.com. Retrieved 1 December 2014.Sloan, Kate, 2018, Art, Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain, Roy Ascott's Groundcourse, Routledge, page 153 He was one of 'a team of mostly young, unsung artists [who] toiled away in rinky-dink offices in Soho Square, London, for nearly a year'Weinstein, Josh, 'How the Beatles' Yellow Submarine gave rise to modern animation', The Guardian online, Monday 19 November 2012. Retrieved 1 September 2014. 'working long .... shifts in the ink and paint department.'Cohen, Karl, 'The Beatles' Yellow Submarine Turns 30: John Coates and Norman Kauffman Look Back' Animation World, Issue 3,4, July 1998. Retrieved 3 September 2014. He mostly painted cels for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Nowhere Man sequences.Weinstein, Josh, 'As great as any Picasso', The Guardian UK, 20 November 2012, 19.
Work After graduating, Powell worked as an advertising art director at Leo Burnett Worldwide London. In 1976, he migrated to Australia and was employed at various agencies in Melbourne, including the local office of US-based advertising agency JWT (J Walter Thompson) and later regional offices in Auckland, Taipei, Detroit, London and Bangkok. In his spare time after work and on weekends, he recorded life on the streets and city skylines from apartment and hotel rooftops in major cities in Australasia, Europe and America where he lived, visited and worked in artist sketchbooks. These sketches would become visual reference for future cityscape paintings.'Vantage Point', by Meg Williams, Docklands News, 29 May 2019. He returned to Melbourne in 2004 to paint full-time.
Advertising
In advertising, Powell is notable for conceiving and directing the mammoth Ford Global Anthem advertisement for Ford Motor Company in 1999.Adforum – Ford – Just Wave Hello / Global Anthem – JWT Detroit. Retrieved 8 February 2015. At the time, it was believed to be one of the biggest television commercial productions in US advertising history, and one of the most widespread use of one commercial at one time by a giant advertiser.Elliot, Stuart, 'Ford Goes Global in Effort to Control the Clock', The New York Times, 27 October 1999, 13–14. It was recorded as the world's first global media roadblock in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1999.'Ford hailed by Guinness with first ad to cover the globe', Brandweek, 24 July 2000.
Major brands were enamoured with music in advertising in the 1990s because of its ubiquity in consumer’s lives, and were aligning themselves with celebrity musicians, using them to endorse their products as a way of cutting through market clutter. As regional (Asia) and later international creative director of the newly-formed Ford/JWT Global Business Unit (1995-2004), Powell collaborated with Melbourne-based British songwriter and music composer Danny Beckerman (1948-2006) to conceive and produce six songs as sound tracks for Ford television commercials between 1995-1999.‘Making Marques - A Journey into Automotive Advertising’, by J.A. Smith, Benzina magazine, Issue 1, April 2021, pages 29-32 Retrieved 1 October 2021Proceedings, The Joy of Motoring, Fourth Annual conference of Automotive Historians Australia, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2019 Retrieved 1 October 2021 Four were recorded for JWT/Ford (Taiwan) and wider release in the Greater China entertainment market by two of Hong Kong’s Cantopop ‘Four Heavenly Kings’ (四大天王) as they were described in the Chinese-language media at the time: Jacky Cheung (Cheung Hok Yau, 张学友) recorded True Love (真爱, 1995, Polygram)Ford Liata 'Wedding' television commercial, 1995, (120secs) and Farewell (拥有, 1995, Polygram).Ford Liata 'Coffee' television commercial, 1995 (120 secs)"真愛" (True Love) is the title track on Cheung’s 1995 debut Mandarin compilation album of the same name. The album is one of the highest-selling greatest hits compilations in Taiwan's recorded music history. See: List of best-selling albums in Taiwan Andy Lau (Lau Tak Wah, 刘德华) recorded Darling/Because of Love (因为爱, 1996, Philips Records)Ford Liata 'Rose' television commercial, 1996 (60 secs) and Love is a Miracle/Love is Mysterious (如此神奇, 1997, Philips Records).Andy Lau discographyFord Liata 'Christening' television commercial, 1997 (120 secs) Hong Kong singer Sandy Lam (Kik-Lin, 林忆莲) sang Say Goodbye (我心仍在, 1997, Rock Records).Ford Liata 'Casablanca' television commercial, 1997 (60 secs) Just Wave Hello (1999, Sony Classical Records) was recorded by Welsh soprano Charlotte Church as the soundtrack for the Ford Global Anthem television commercial. The song was simultaneously released as a single and lead track on her self-titled second album Charlotte Church in 1999.Music: Ford Global AnthemCharlotte Church discography
Art
Major themes and styles Australia from an outsider's view became a major theme in his landscapes and cityscapes. His early style was representational and later became more experimental and abstracted.
Landscapes At the time, Powell's work was strongly influenced by two well-known Australian landscape artists. The first was Australian painter and printmaker Fred Williams (1927–1982) who Powell never met and whose method he adopted of reworking the same motif a number of times in different mediums and over a number of years. The other was Clifton Pugh AO (1924–1990) who Powell accompanied on a three-week painting trip to the Kimberley Ranges in Western Australia in 1989. It was under Pugh's influence and tutelage he first painted the unique landscape of Outback Australia. In 2005, he went back to the Kimberley Ranges to camp and paint the landscape for three weeks and find a new direction for his art.'Powell at Gasworks', Emerald Hill Weekly, 2–8 April 2008, 14.'Stories of the earth', Emerald Hill Weekly, 23–29 April 2008, 13
Installation and portraiture Between 2007 and 2009, his focus shifted from landscapes to more social and political themes across a variety of mediums, genres and styles, including portraiture and installation. White Trash was a multimedia installation created out of discarded factory-made household objects found on the streets near his home and studio over a three-week period in 2007, and was part of a group exhibition on the theme of 'Contamination' (2007) at Gasworks Arts Park, Albert Park, Victoria.Contamination: an artistic response to a contaminated landscape and its planned remediation by Gasworks' resident visual artists, Gasworks Arts Park, 2007. Worldcat online library catalogue. Retrieved 8 February 2015. The title of the work was a verbal pun on the environmental havoc caused by predominantly 'white' Australians discarding unwanted household items in suburban streets. When asked if the assemblage of white and white painted found objects, including an old car bonnet, bedheads, cigarettes and discarded electrical items was a work of art, Powell described it as more of an expression of an appalling sense of waste in contemporary consumer society. When the exhibition ended, the installation was disassembled and the objects taken to the council waste facility in nearby Port Melbourne for disposal.Interview with Ted Powell on Smart Arts, Triple R radio, 17 September 2007.
A private commission of fifteen paintings on the theme of endangered forests in Australia for a prominent Riverina winery in 2006 sparked an interest in conservation, and concern about the impact excessive logging, road building and too frequent burning off was having on native animals. This culminated in a joint exhibition of animal portraits, titled Poetic Fauna, in 2009 with fellow Briton, writer and poet Bryan S. Cooper. As migrants to Australia in the 1970s, their view was that most animals unique to Australia were either cherished as national symbols or considered dangerous and generally treated badly by humans. The poems that accompanied the paintings, sketches and mono prints used the 'voice' of the animals themselves as a form of protest against their treatment.'Something to fauna over', Emerald Hill Weekly, 6 May 2009.
Cityscapes The city of Melbourne had a profound effect on Powell's work and became the primary motif from 2009 onwards. His first urban landscapes or cityscapes were of Melbourne, and mostly around the industrial area near the Westgate Bridge that spans the Yarra River linking the east to the west of the city. Fred Williams had produced a group of four large strip format gouache-on-paper paintings called the West Gate Bridge series showing the half-constructed bridge in 1970, and had planned to paint the length of the river but he lost heart in the project after a section of the bridge collapsed on 15 October 1970, while it was still under construction, killing thirty-five workers.Sinclair, Jenny, 'Sorrowful Crossing', The Age, 9 October 2010. Retrieved 8 February 2015. The story of the collapse was far from fading in people's memory forty years on and Powell saw the anniversary as an opportunity to present the iconic bridge in new light.'A dull bridge comes to light', Port Phillip Leader, 1 May 2010, 11.'Rivers of light', The Age, 5 May 2010, 20.'Westgate bridge comes to light', Leader News, 14 May 2010.