Art Sync: Pieces of Many Days - Conversation with Martha Armstrong - Viewing Room

Martha Armstrong painting at Mt. Gretna Lake, PA

Tucson Early Spring, 28" x 36", Oil On Canvas

Elizabeth Johnson: Your interview with Larry Groff, on PaintingPerceptions.com, covers a lot of territory. One statement you made struck a chord for me: "I think the older I get the more complicated the world seems. I don't want simple answers." Painting surely has made you more sensitive to detail, and you both streamline incidentals and revel in complex patterns. Would a corollary for your quote be, "The older I get the more I make complexity simple"?

Martha Armstrong: I don’t make complexity simple. I’m more interested in making painting as complex as I see the world. Not harmonious or ‘finished’ but rich and fragmented.

EJ: In your artist statement you say,

"I go after the whole for as long as I can––days, weeks, scraping in between, but focusing on what is out there, no matter how much it changes. I want the image to have pieces of many days. I work on small studies along the way trying to get an idea about the whole."

Martha Armstrong painting in Vermont, 2017

EJ: ...Has your quest for unity created from experimenting with parts changed over the years? How does ‘wholeness’ feel different now than when you were beginning to paint?

MA: The paintings just shown at Gross McCleaf, which I painted in Philadelphia in the early 1980s, were focused on color and shape. I can see now I was looking for a big space and to use color to construct it. I wanted a simple clarity. Wholeness now means many parts relating to a whole, but the parts can be different and dissimilar to the whole.

I don’t remember when I began to paint. It was before I went to school. I have an early memory of living with my grandmother, who arranged a mirror just out of my reach. I’m standing up in a baby bed, with a window behind me. I could see trees moving in the mirror. I think I bonded with trees.

EJ: You seem to paint more abstractly when addressing landscape, and more realistically when dealing with portraits, still lifes, and interiors. Does your decision about what to paint follow your mood of how abstractly you want to paint at any given time?

Martha Armstrong painting Mt. Gretna's lake, PA, painting pictured below

MA: I paint what is available. In winter I am more likely to paint still lifes or figures. Both subjects demand a certain accuracy so they must be representational. It is upsetting to see someone’s eye in the wrong place. Painting still lifes, I find something on a table or juxtapose objects until there is a relationship that means something to me.

But I am most inspired by landscapes. I have always loved being outside: taking a back road to school, wandering in woods near our house, exploring lumberjack roads near my grandmother’s summer cottage in Michigan. There was so much to learn––trees, plants, birds, animals––all alive. How to translate that huge moving space onto a canvas has always fascinated me. I built a studio on a hillside in Vermont so I could concentrate on one wild natural space.

Mt. Gretna Lake II, 28" x 36", Oil On Canvas

Toward Sunset I, 25" x 40", Oil On Canvas

EJ: Toward Sunset I, Toward Sunset II, and Sunset deal with the same view, are about the same size, and were made about the same time. They seem to locate different visual pathways through the same scene. For me, Toward Sunset I and Sunset highlight a left-to-right flow through landmarks, and Toward Sunset II describes a pathway to the sun. Is committing to a pathway of looking the most important factor for achieving ‘wholeness’ in your work? Are there more steps than studying a scene again after editing or scraping back that goes into finding the best pathway?

MA: Toward Sunset I and II were started a year apart in Tucson, where our son and family live. The mesquite in bloom in the lower right corner in Toward Sunset I was the motivation for that painting.

Toward Sunset II, 25" x 40", Oil On Canvas

MA: I had tried to cut that tree back year after year so I could see the mountains beyond it. I gave up finally. Mesquites are irrepressible. Their spring flowers are exuberant.

Toward Sunset II is the Sun gathering color as the sky goes dark. Sunsets in Arizona are a huge daily drama. I suspect people are in danger of driving off the road as they try to watch one of the wonders of the world. I painted Sunset II over several days, a lot from memory or experience of quickly trying for the whole. What goes down on the canvas is a kind of shorthand notetaking because there is no time. I try to make sense of the marks later.

The painting Sunset was started one year and finished the next. I have taken a photo of the original painting and still want to make a painting from that.

Vermont December II, 48" x 60", Oil On Canvas

EJ: Late Sun, Vermont, December, and Vermont, December II are all the same size, recording an identical view in different seasons. I love how accurately the three together capture the feeling of transition from fall to early winter. Your horizontal and vertical structural shapes flow inside each painting and between the three paintings. Do you prefer to have like paintings exhibited together to emphasize subtle differences and the passage of time? Do moving images such as film or video influence you?

MA: I do like to paint a subject over and over and to see the paintings together. Late Sun comes before Vermont, December I and II in 2023. There are earlier versions: From Here to There and Fall 2020 are all 48 x 60 inches. In early December the Oak trees still have leaves and color. In late December the leaves have lost color, and the landscape is full of light reflected off the pale ground.

Late Sun, 48" x 60", Oil On Canvas

MA: I am not influenced by film. I studied dance growing up, mostly classical ballet but modern dance too. Movement and rhythm seem to me a natural part of painting and drawing.

EJ: Do previous paintings stand out in your memory as works to differ from? Or do you think of past works as present and incorporated into your process of painting now?

MA: I don’t think of past paintings when I begin a new painting. I look at the landscape as it is that day.

It is enough to concentrate on that and it will be different in the afternoon––and the next day––and next week or whenever I get back to it.

To hang on to what it looked like yesterday is useless.

Governor Dick's Woods III, 28" x 36", Oil On Canvas

Fall Study II, 11" x 16", Oil On Canvas

EJ: Many of your pieces gather momentum, exploding and reassembling in multiple zones across a painting, and emphasizing one zone as a culmination of activity.

Some examples of creating wholeness by punctuating it are: a focal point of dark land and its reflection at the bottom center Governor Dick's Woods; the busy, blonder, vertical limbs in the center of Vermont, December II; the Sun in Sunset; bright yellow leaves in Fall Study II; a red slash in the center of Vermont, December.

Tucson Early Spring and Fall Orchard balance two sides of a painting with color or varied shape. Are there other compositional devices that you see yourself using?

Fall Orchard, 30" x 48", Oil On Canvas

MA: I would guess it is natural to go after a piece of the image that is strong: the Sun becoming a colorful sunset, the red leafed oak that distinguishes itself against oranges and yellows, the dead leaves on the oak as all other leaves and color passes. The dark lower center of Governor Dick’s Pond is a source for the pond, the drain is on the opposite side. (I believe! Not quite sure.) The water comes down the hill behind the trees, a pond is created to hold it but has a drain that lets too much water pass, straining out debris, but not goldfish and tadpoles. The yellow leaves in Fall Study II are briefly dominant in the landscape: two sugar maples together. I go after that dominance first.

MA: Tucson Early Spring has an equilibrium, as does Fall Orchard. A balance from side to side? A time of year? I didn’t think about it. It is what I see, so I paint it. You make me see it later!

Palo Verde and Mesquite I, 40" x 40", Oil On Canvas

EJ: Contrasting and/or combining horizontal and vertical strokes of paint blossom into complex shapes, resembling Asian calligraphy, and mixing abstraction and realism.

I imagine that you are simplifying while you spin and weave patterns and form.

Can you describe how imagination enters this process? Or, would you say painting from after images of reality (images held briefly in your mind) is more important?

MA: Imagination. I’m not sure of your question, but form is important in any art.

A dancer’s movements are not random. Music is usually written in a key, and to change key is a statement against a form, intended to be expressive. To go from strong, clear form in a painting to fragmentation, from clear color to mud, says something.

Martha Armstrong painting at Governor Dick's Pond, Mt. Gretna, PA

MA: I do work with form to 'make' the painting regardless of what something looks like. I am not copying nature. I am not a scientist making an exact replica. Nature is the inspiration, something to hang on to, to put my feet on the ground. I like the surprise that painters use to translate the world as we see it.

Abstract painting fascinates me. But in the end, I want something specific from the world I see.

EJ: Frank Auerbach will boldly paint a jagged line across a subject. Do you see your work as being like or different from his?

MA: I admire Frank Auerbach. He paints his truth, which has a lot to do with Germany and WW II. He is clear. I must paint my truth.

Martha Armstrong painting, 1986

MA: My family was in disarray when I was young. It was confusing for me. When I encountered painting in kindergarten I clung to it like a life raft. I didn’t think of being in a group, of competing with other painters, contemporary or historical. I look to anyone for ideas, examples I admire. But the need is to find your own voice. A hard thing to do. When you stray from that, you lose your way.

––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)

edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)

May 2024

View Martha Armstrong, New Paintings: Vermont, Mt. Gretna, Tucson Here

Martha Armstrong painting on her porch in Tucson

Exhibition Dates:

May 2 - 23, 2024

Martha Armstrong has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums across the United States. Her exhibitions have received press coverage in Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Philadelphia Inquirer as well as many magazines, blogs, books, and catalogs. Many prestigious public institutions have acquired her works including The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, The Free Library of Philadelphia, Allentown Art Museum and colleges, banks, schools, and offices across the country. She is a visiting instructor and critic, most recently teaching at Mt. Gretna School of Art in Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania, and the International Center for the Arts in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy. She lives and works between West Dummerston, Vermont and Tucson, Arizona.

February Sunset, 9" x 18", Oil On Canvas