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Pointed Bushes, Versailles © 1999 David Armstrong |
Staircase, Newport © 1999 David Armstrong |
David Armstrong was born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts
and attended the Boston Museum School from 1974-77, where he'd planned
to study painting but instead switched almost immediately to photography.
He spent the next decade working in either New York or Boston before receiving
a BFA at Tufts University in 1988. Following this, he worked primarily
on black and white portraits. Because Armstrong works intuitively, the
portraits are personal and intense. The work is forceful yet ephemeral
- capturing the essence of the person while ineffably capturing the essence
of Armstrong's own desire.
IN the early 90s, Armstrong began working on landscapes, both as a new
stimulus and as a way to relinquish control of the earlier, more rigid
images. The landscapes - soft focus, painterly - also embody the personal
the ephemeral. Again they capture the essence of what they are and who
Armstrong is; they're both internal and external landscapes. After moving
to Berlin in 1992, Armstrong began working in color - almost by accident
- and soon his 'eye' began seeing almost exclusively in color. Discreetly
dramatic, these powerful landscapes sneak up on you; the palette is singularly
lush, mysterious and sensual.
The work of the last four or five years has become a synthesis of portraiture
and landscape - one could not exist without the formal or intuitive elements
of the other. The newest work is a series of portraits of trees: diptychs
that re simple and eloquent, yet full of the same quiet turbulence, raw
beauty and mercurial emotion that have always been present in Armstrong's
work.
Wall at Versailles
1992/1999
Photogravure
Image: 19.25 x 28.5 inches
Sheet: 28.75 x 37 inches
Edition of 35
Published by Marlborough Graphics, NY
© 1999 David Armstrong