“If I am forced to associate, I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes, worlds, and distances held on a flat surface”.
– Helen Frankenthaler
In his new paintings Robert Armstrong delights in the dripping, slipping, scraping, melding, oozing, brushing, and drying of oil paint on a heavily gessoed linen ground. The squeegee ravages the surface, clearing, and altering the physical ground as well as shaping the image itself. The results present ‘paintscape’ images of their own making and they connect to natural and man-made processes in landscape. The world depicted seems poised in a state of flux, suggesting the natural cycle of change, yet witness also to the interference of humanity.
Bio
Born in Gorey, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1953, Robert Armstrong lives and works in Dublin, and is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, also in Dublin. He is a Founder Member of Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin and was Head of Painting at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) from 2002 until his retirement in 2018, having taught at the college since 1991. He has exhibited regularly in Ireland and abroad for more than forty years. His work is included in many private and public collections and has been the subject of essays by writers including Aidan Dunne, Declan Long and Colm Tóibín.
