Sitting in his private studio, Alex Powers gazes out an expansive window from the second story of his apartment a few blocks from the beach. On his easel rests a carbon pencil and pastel drawing, hanging in the limbo of creative vision and finished product. The room is awash in natural light, the easel angled to maximize its illuminating effects. This is the scene where the artist collects his passion and channels it into a visual expression.

But Powers is not all about ocean breezes and sunshine; nor is the finished product a serene portrait of sand dunes and fishing boats. Powers, an internationally renowned artist, teacher and critic, discovered early in his career that simply creating an accurate representation of an object or scene was not an acceptable goal for him. Sure, he could learn the technique, gaze at the subject and churn out a sellable product; he made a living for years painting portraits on the sidewalks of Myrtle Beach. But the outcome of that kind of art wasn’t good enough.

At that point—in the 1980s, when he was in his 30s—he says, “I decided I was doing this for me, not for anybody else. I didn’t want to get to the age I am now not having done what I wanted to do. Selfish is good, in certain situations. It’s my life.”
 
Powers’ choice had to do with continuing to create scenes that sold to a popular audience or going further to express his authentic observations, opinions, and vision of life and human experience. When Powers began his artistic career, he says, “I had no idea I had anything I wanted to express.” As that personal aesthetic developed, however, his urge to convey it emerged. He discovered, as he remarked to his brother years ago, “I wanted to take the prettiness out of my art and see if there was any art left.”
 
It turns out, there was. Powers’ work in gouache, pastel and watercolor has won Best-of-Show awards in 14 national competitions, including a 1997 gold medal from the American Watercolor Society; he has participated in 13 invitational exhibitions, several of them international; his work has been featured in 11 books and numerous national publications; he’s been a juror for 50 exhibitions, including the 2010 Southeastern Watercolor Society in Dallas; he authored the book Painting People in Watercolor—a Design Approach; and his work is included in permanent collections in galleries in Columbia, Toronto and Myrtle Beach, as well as seven museums across the country.

Powers’ most recent local exhibit was a retrospective titled alex powers: inquiries housed at the Myrtle Beach Art Museum in 2010. The exhibit celebrated his 40-year career by highlighting the past two decades.
    
The direction of his vision has evolved, from landscapes to baseball to political statements to variations on the human form. In each, his art is driven by expression—the passion or content of the message—rather than form or technique. A 2003 painting,  Crossing, was an element of Powers’ Occupy Wall Street paintings, a period in his career focusing on economic and global inequalities. The painting’s text references various kinds of crossing, from crossing into the country as an immigrant, to crossing from one period of life to another, to crossing paths with another individual along life’s journey.

Crossing won two national awards, and, as Powers says of the piece, “Crossing is geographic, it’s aesthetic, it’s economic, it’s everything. When I painted it, I heard from people who had very different interpretations of it, which is wonderful. I see it as cultures and ethnic groups coming together; you could also see it as people crossing an intersection in Manhattan or some undefined field in the world.”

Today, Powers continues to create, critique, enter competitions and teach. He’s taught and influenced numerous Myrtle Beach area artists, including Dixie Dugan, who says Powers “taught me how to see.” Claudia McCollough, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Coastal Carolina University and a past student of Powers’, commented on the nature of Powers’ artistic process: “Alex’s work—whether in watercolor, pastel, charcoal, or another medium—excels because he constructs his work from the inside out.  Alex has the uncanny ability to see, know and establish the ‘soul’ of his subject matter before he draws or paints it.”

Along with local and national workshops, Powers will continue teaching classes this year at local studios, including Art and Soul in Myrtle Beach. As he continues to emphasize passion over technique, he says of his work, “I want people to like it.  But I also want it to make them feel, to make them think.”