Anxiety and obsession: how Donald Trump drove Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s portraitist’s latest works 

Donald Trump is a man difficult to ignore. Just ask James Powditch.

“I’ve been obsessed with Trump since he got elected,” the portraitist for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confesses.

“I thought we were rid of him, and then he’s back and just everywhere again.”

The anxiety that has ruled Powditch since his upbringing as a child to a single mum, constantly on the move, reared its head ahead of last November’s Presidential election as Kamala Harris’ campaign imploded, and with it, the Democrats’ dreams of confining Donald Trump to being a one-term aberration in US political history.

Powditch — selected nine times for the Archibald Portrait Prize — sensed the inevitable Trump resurrection as early as last July, and knew it signalled more than a political revolution.

“I was in a state of disbelief that something so set in stone could just change so quickly, and thinking about how other empires must also have gone through the same thing,” he said, in a video interview from his studio in Annandale, in Sydney’s inner-west.

“That sense of how what we take as a given can just disappear almost overnight.

“And how those who lived through, say the fall of the British Empire, as the most recent example, must have thought it would be impossible for it to fall before it did.

“I mean, it was huge, geographically and in population, and it just collapsed in the space of a few decades.”

He began working on Camelot, the first of the 27 mixed media pieces that would go on to form his new exhibition, Empire Fall which opened at Nanda\Hobbs in NSW last Thursday night and runs until August 9.

“The whole show could be seen as a manifestation of how I deal with stress, anxiety — I’m more or less OCD,” he admits.

The pieces are as much a visual homage to past and present empires as they are a commentary on their decline.

The works are made up of collected fragments and objects that discuss not just the fall of the British Empire, but also the Greek, Roman, Mongol and French empires.

Flags, colours, stripes, shapes from assorted materials including metals and woods, are fitted together in his signature, organised, layered jumble, as if to show the ragged, frayed ends of an Empire coming apart.

“All my works carry a history in the materials that make them up,” he explains.

“So much of that is simply for my own joy because the original use or meaning of something is completely usurped by how it works in its new context.

“So I might know the history of an object that is lost on viewers.

“It makes the work intensely personal because I have a unique connection to all the various elements.”

There is a sense of betrayal that runs through Powditch as he discusses his relationship with the United States, now ruled by Mr Trump.

“I grew up loving the US,” he says.

“I was unfortunately cursed with an absolute obsession with the US and politics.

“It goes back to childhood and my dad living there in New York and me not going and seeing America as this wonderful, cliche of the Light on the Hill.

“I just thought it was this incredible, can-do place, where everything was bigger and better.”

He points to the “Golden Kennedy Age” as a time of more civilised and rational debate, but knowing that it was all “a bit of a fairytale,” as exposed by the contemporary support for Mr Trump.

“Trump probably manifests the cold, hard reality that’s always been there, just hidden by American myth-making and maybe the self-delusion that the US was a force for good in the world,” he said.

As Powditch began creating Camelot, using a 45 RPM vinyl recording of JFK’s inauguration speech as its “spine”, he wasn’t sure if he was making a one-off piece of work or something more.

“As the US election got closer and I got more and more nervous about the results,” he said.

“I just kept making works with a nervous energy, but I was also kind of hopeful that it would be OK.

“Maybe there was some wishful thinking that the US would not replicate the fates of the countries I was working my way through.”

He sees Mr Trump’s re-election as another example of history repeating itself, a risen empire in decline.

This eventually spurred the subsequent creation of 26 more pieces.

He describes his work as analogue and constructed with elements that have loose connections at first glance.

Others are more obvious, literal-even, using texts, flags such as the Union Jack or reorganising the colours and splicing the shapes of national flags, such as Japan’s.

“Some like the Belgian work are, I hope, just kind of funny and absurd, telling a kind of alternate history whilst being clearly linked in this case by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.”

Two pieces that reference the United States contain the word ‘MAD’, and one is named Peace Through Strength, Donald Trump’s foreign policy slogan that has so far failed to live up to expectations in ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

“I’ve revisited all these empires, and with current events in the US, I’m more depressed than ever,” he bemoans.

“I honestly can’t see a way through for the world.

“It did seem kind of ludicrous to be in the studio putting these things together in an obsessive OCD way whilst the world falls apart.”

If he seems melodramatic, his therapist might agree.

He says he has been plagued with anxiety since childhood, bouncing between a dozen homes from the ages of 7 to 13, attending six different primary schools.

“I was brought up by a single mum and we moved a lot,” he explains.

“So my own little world was always ending, and I lived in a heightened state of high anxiety whilst also watching a diet of dystopian sci-fi films like Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Silent Running, Omega Man that just fed a very, very bleak view of the world.”

Powditch is best known for his Archibald entries, including his portraits of his local member, Anthony Albanese and ABC journalists Kerry O’Brien and Laura Tingle.

“I’m a card-carrying Labor member — you’re not wrong,” he says.

“Some people think I’m quite a political artist or whatever.

“I’m a political person, but I don’t actually think of myself as a political artist at all.

“I’d like to be over my Trump obsession.”