#BLUESKY DESIGN ARMSTRONG FULL#

#BLUESKY DESIGN ARMSTRONG FULL#

In 2003 Alexi Worth wrote in The New Yorker, “Armstrong’s high, sharp energy is Yankee Fauvism at it’s best.” Lance Esplund, in Art in America, wrote in 2004, “I enjoy the all-out belting of the melody which is full of honesty and heart.” In 2009 Victoria Donohue wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “In these works it’s still possible to believe that aesthetic presence might have some impact on the hard reality of everyday existence”, and in 2011 she wrote: “Her landscapes have a simplify and power Their intensity of focus on feeling and seasonal changes (are) ambitious exercises in reconciling geometry and gesture…”Īrmstrong studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Smith College, and Rhode Island School of Design. She has taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Indiana University, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Dartmouth, and Havorford Colleges, and now is a graduate critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

She has received grants from Smith College, a residency at Hollins University, and at the Camargo Foundation in France, and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Martha Armstrong has had many one -person and group shows in the United States and Italy. Martha Armstrong is represented by the Elder Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina Oxbow Gallery, Northampton, Massachusetts, Gross McCleaf Gallery Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Bowery Gallery, New York City. I’d like to thank Martha Armstrong for being so generous with her time and attention with making this such a thoughtful interview. I’d like to thank Martha Armstrong for being so generous with her time and attention with making this such a thoughtful interview.Īt the end of our interview I’ve included quotes of paint-wisdom from her previous writings. See this link for more information.īelow the end of interview I’ve included quotes of paint-wisdom from her previous writings, these gems read like art-koans. Martha Armstrong is conducting an early June residency workshop in Italy at the International Center for the Arts at MonteCastello di Vibio.

At once improvisational and carefully carpentered, these paintings explode toward the eye, like nature on first sight, at it’s most welcoming and irrepressible.” But her shapes also maintain a nearly sculptural independence, hovering slightly above the image, just beyond legibility. She stacks blocky shapes of color that describe one landscape - a hill with some woods and a shack - visible from the window of her Vermont studio that may be her Mont Sainte-Victoire. Armstrong is the suave disciplinarian of a muscular style. The New York Times’ Roberta Smith reviewed Martha Armstrong’s Bowery show, Martha Armstrong’s Nature Scenes at Bowery Gallery, in Sept. Armstrong takes the most interesting aspects of what past artists have explored in this realm of abstracted observation–Bonnard, Braque, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe, Lois Dodd among others–and makes it a uniquely personal and inventive manner of responding pictorially to nature. Martha Armstrong’s painting combines close observation with invention in a balanced measure, which she uses to create solid structures and harmonies that dance parallel alongside nature. I’m keenly interested in Martha Armstrong’s paintings especially as a means to further explore the range of possibilities for painters to use observed nature as either as a point of departure or as a reason in and of itself. We talked at length about her history, painting process and thoughts on art, occasionally interrupted by roaming peacocks looking for handouts. We met at a mutual friend’s home where we sat out on a hillside deck overlooking a huge valley with the distant city and ocean beyond. Martha Armstrong was in San Diego a few weeks ago and agreed to an interview with me. Dusk Colors, oil on linen, 34 x 50 inches

Bluesky design armstrong