Julia S. Powell: Slack Tide
Between flood and ebb, tidal currents briefly still before changing direction. These paintings follow a similar rhythm, returning to familiar places at different hours and seasons. Slack Tide is about time.
Across the exhibition, something is fixed and something is fleeting: reflections briefly resolve, then break apart across the water’s surface; boats remain at their moorings as the sky and water change around them; trees stand through shifts in light and weather. Moving between abstraction, impressionism, and realism, Powell invites close attention to differences within repetition: what a familiar subject reveals at another hour, in another season, or through another way of painting.
Some of these works were painted over earlier compositions. Traces of previous images and decisions remain visible, bringing the passage of time into the paintings’ surfaces. What appears to be a single view contains an accumulation of revisions, with earlier work continuing to shape the image we see.
Powell made these paintings while raising her young children as a single mother and caring for her own mother. The overlapping demands of care give personal weight to the exhibition’s attention to time.
In Slack Tide, stillness is never permanent. Like the earlier compositions beneath the painted surfaces, what came before remains part of the present.
A reception for Slack Tide will be held on Thursday, December 10, from 5:00 - 7:00 PM.
On view at The Roberts Gallery, Lesley Art + Design
1801 Mass Ave., Porter Square, Cambridge
December 3, 2026 - January 31, 2027
