(b. 1953) in Gorey, Co.Wexford and Lives and works in Dublin.
The sources of Robert Armstrong’s paintings include references to Art history, ancient geological maps, and current environmental catastrophes. The paintings present images of landscape, mountains, caves, clouds, water, and floods - familiar landscape motifs in a changing world.
The paintings are not depictive of particular places or events, but instead reveal the struggle between the certainty of the photographic source and the process used to create the image. The paint – whether thick or thin, opaque or transparent – mostly depicts itself. Regard for the material properties of paint and the methods of its application can obliterate or blur the image in favour of the autonomous pulse of the new painting.
In contrast to digital imagery, which can be grasped quickly and flicked away, the intention is to make paintings which demand and reward slow looking.