Welcome. The artist is from Chicago, attending a commercial art school there, albeit in the fine arts department. That somewhat  ironic pathway afforded him a strict training in the fundamentals of the pictorial arts, studying in multiple mediums and theory, and at the same time gaining from intense studio time, drawing and painting every day from live models for over a four year period. Learning Art History was adjunct, auto-didactically in the early years, and later formally as part of a curriculum of study at the University of Oregon and a bachelors degree in English literature. A born artist, with a true metaphysical bent and having the art spirit as always his deepest abiding interest, Jack has travelled a lifelong path in dedication to all things poetic, and not only paints but has entrained himself into a studied and well-practiced person of lettres and a jazz musician.

His enthusiasm for and in all three forms of expression has not waned, and we are fortunate to engage with and share enjoyment of these expressions of one everyman/everywoman who is like us in celebrating and honoring the better angels of our humanity, which is to say consciousness, realization of truth and beauty. His own life, he feels, imitates art; but only that art which best imitates nature, and which best acknowledges, as Yeats would say, his two eternities.

Armstrong’s own art schooling began in the spirit of Impressionism, a la Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, John Singer Sergeant. But being a child of the Postmodern, his art appreciation and consumption has been a cornucopia of redux, media and styles. As a serious student of Art, and like most people, he reveres the powerful talent and genius of the Renaissance painters and the Dutch Masters. As our world and Criticism were borne of the Modernist mind, and have now evolved through and beyond the Post-modern world and into a post-humanist perspective, appreciating a painting, beyond simply its commercial value, is more subjective and complex than ever. No person or painting is one thing, or even two things— It is everything, and past present and future perhaps all at once. As such, these pictures can be much appreciated not just for the painterly— the color, the texture, the light, the line—but for the context from which they have been conceived and performed: the times, the places, the person. Everyone, every life, every good painting, is a perfect storm.

Inasmuch as literature and film are also informing elements to any artist’s expression, one can perhaps even greater appreciate these paintings and find or translate the allusions, the hidden meanings, the personal influences behind the piece, by looking there. For Jack Armstrong, one might look to the films of Bresson, Godard, The Archers, Reed, Welles, Ritt, Bunuel, Almodovar. And while the Western canon is the Font, the Source, make up the true holy books, and not-withstanding Shakespeare, in particular the most about our artist can be apprehended through Shaw, Yeats, and James Joyce. 

Today, thematically, his desire is to re-imagine and intuitively abstract the natural landscape, the human figure and the human face. He does occasionally make allowance, for the purposes of humor and irony, for a sub-category of pictures depicting or alluding to wonderful shots from wonderful films. Armstrong welcomes commission work in any of these artistic idioms.

Most of the paintings  presented on this website are done in oil. All of them are float-framed, unless otherwise noted.

You can also read Jack and see more of his pictures on Substack.

Self-portrait c. 1979