Edward Povey

Green Proto Writing

Born in 1951, Edward Povey studied arts throughout the 1970s at both the Eastbourne College and the University of Wales. In the late 1990s, he was invited to join the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art and began to be shown in museums both in Britain and the United States. From 2008 to 2010, he entered a period of transition in which he moved to the United States. Povey's familiarity with Central Texas began in the early nineties when he paid a visit on the invitation of one of his sons' friends. “I met six people, who all said, ‘You've got to come to dinner, and you must come and see us, and this and this,’” Povey recalls. “Then I’d come down and go to dinner with three of them, and each time there would be six more people who would say, ‘Hey, you really have to do this and this.’” With every visit, Povey’s circle of Austin friends kept expanding geometrically and with it the number of people who were also interested in his artwork. “It just sort of grew and grew, because I was doing these kinds of Gertrude Stein-y things,” says Povey. “And through those, I got some really fervent collectors, collectors who started out timidly and then became just obsessed. One of the biggest collections in the world now — it later moved up to the Panhandle, but there are about 60 works in that one collection.” In the fall of 2018, Povey, along with his wife and artistic partner Tolar Schultz, returned to the UK to care for his elderly mother in the London countryside.