PAINTINGS
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David
Armstrong
David Armstrong started painting as a boy growing up in Ottawa. He studied
at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and then at the Art Center Los Angeles
where, to finance his studies, he instructed at the Butler Fine Arts School.
He lived for a few years in Toronto, painting abstracts and figures and then
moved to Georgian Bay to paint in the footsteps of the Group of Seven.
In the early 90's, he moved to Victoria, BC to paint the island villages, the rugged coast, and the West Coast sky and now lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario, where he enjoys the small town lifestyle with lots of subject matter at the back door.
David established his reputation as an oil painter in the mid-sixties; moving to water colour throughout the eighties and nineties. Since returning to Ontario he has been painting with acrylics, his work becoming larger and looser because of it. His paintings are largely pictorial though somewhat abstract, with colours from a simple palette of earth pigments used with large brushes. The result is fresh and lively. As an easel artist, he paints vertically and directly, most paintings done 'a la prima', with farms, villages, and urban landscapes as frequent themes. In the last couple of years, David has begun to make his own tailor-made frames from white pine or basswood, cut wide and painted to show layers of colour in the old traditional way of gesso with a patina worked into the surface.