agency noun. 1. Active operation; action; power. 2. A mode of action; means; instrumentality; action personified.
Imagine the free agency of a contemporary painter in Canada. Ensconced in his studio, John Armstrong speculates on modern life, art history (as ever the diligent professor), personal and national notions of identity, and conceptions of fleeting feeling and touch. Armstrong’s paintings are small-scale investigations of an iconography of the second half of the twentieth century. This is itself Armstrong’s own time, born as he was in 1955. In recent years Armstrong has pursued his painting practice in his studio in Toronto and during summers in Paris, France (1991, 1989, 1988), and in Halifax, Nova Scotia (1990). Where he lives informs Armstrong’s paintings in incidental ways. Images are culled from daily experiences and composed. The paintings are personal in the sense that these images are Armstrong’s responses to his own history, his circumstances, where he has lived, grown, and where he lives and works at the present moment. Painting is an agency through which experience in the world passes. To say painting is an agency of one’s life is a testament of faith for any painter. Armstrong’s paintings are agencies of being in the world, agents of action, instruments of self-identity. The things which Armstrong chooses to paint are also instruments of identity; empirical evidence; mundane and significant things. The things painted tell something about the look of the world, but more culturally specific –they are orientation signs for a Canadian born in the mid-twentieth century. It is one of the virtues of painting that the painter can form very personal choices of images from the facts of the world. paintings as instruments of tactility Beginning with a series of works in 1988 titled Hands and Still-life, Armstrong worked consistently on a small-scale of 40 x 50 cm., and established a manner of painting images of hands combined with elements and imagery encountered in his daily life. The hands in these early works are the symbols of touch and the most explicit sign that an inquiry into tactility is among the major themes of Armstrong’s recent work. Images of Armstrong’s left hand were painted (by his right hand) and images of hands from advertisements were also used as sources. Hands in various gloves and hands of person holding a cigarette, are among the versions of expressive hand gesture that Armstrong feels out in the different paintings. As much as the lines of a hand are read to tell the fortune of a person, Armstrong’s hand images are symbol and ciphers. The careful study and painting of the hands and gloves is like a study of a personality of touch. The hands are self-portraits of character in carefully observed detail, thickly painted, and again, with an expressive and articulate painterly tactility. Each painting can be reads as a study in the touch, the speculative vision, the slice of history and time in which John Armstrong lives. These early paintings are a beginning of an investigation in seeing, in touching, in increasing proficiency of painting technique. Important as the hands are as the subject and the agent of inquiry, they are curiously disembodied, cut-off at the edges of the paintings, and often constrained in gloves. Armstrong’s paintings are tactile constructions even when the image of the hand disappears. Carefully and labouriously built-up, the paintings arise from the painter’s gentle manipulations, the paint nearly carved in thick passages and in other areas stroked and washed in glazes. The visual imagery of flowers and fields of complex pattern are manifestly tactile –even as the imaginary realm invites virtual caresses. still-life with flowers Armstrong’s paintings are constructed in the tradition of the still-life genre, composed with elements painted from life. The compositions freely combine images of fish, flowers and plant-life, printed matter (newspapers, cartons, advertising copy, etc.), patterns, advertising graphics, and words copied in eccentric typographic styles. As with some of the hands, some of the images are derived from printed sources and it is difficult to always known which images were painted from life and which were copied from reproductions. A still-life painting typically expresses the notion of life’s fleeting beauty; it is a vanitas, a reminder that beauty is temporal, life is short. Armstrong situates himself in this tradition but with a contemporary sensibility. As in a traditional still-life painting, Armstrong’s flowers are reminders of passing time and fading enthusiasms. However, brand-names and advertising images are evocations of recent history; recent enough to remember but now longer articles of faith for a better future. It is here that we sense a melancholy, the contemporary fin-de-siecle ennui, the post-modern cynical malaise. The titles of the paintings are derived from the typographic names included in the paintings. The words in the earlier painting function both as referents to the world from which they are taken (newspapers and magazines from Canada or France, advertisements, commercial product brand-names, etc.), and as poetic phrases that lend surplus associations or introduce new contexts for the ‘still-life’. the name of the father In the most recent painted words become names of people, usually male, but very interestingly, they are derived from commercial product names. Armstrong has searched out male first names from ads, and reproduced them in their typographic styles. They are therefore somewhat generic, packaged, marketed, impersonal labels. Yet they are imbued with the notion of familiarity without actually being a person. If you know someone with the name of Thomas or Lou or John, for example, the personality of your reference is defeated by the brand and typographical style of the name. Armstrong is suggesting perhaps that the name of a man, even maleness itself, is socially constructed. We are trading in received identities, merchandised personalities. The male first name becomes a major theme in Armstrong’s recent paintings and the still-life motif becomes dominated by the association of male names with flowers. A funereal mood is suggested by the combination o the names with wreaths, garlands, and coils of leaves and fading roses. Armstrong has suggested that one of the things he had in mind while painting these works was the idea of memorial to the male hegemony in painting. In concert with this mood is the contemporary (fin-de-siecle, encore) theoretical notion of the failure of the (male dominated) master narratives of history, psychology, law, etc. The paintings have a mood o walking through a cemetery of memorials to people you don’t know, or as Armstrong has suggested, the feeling is like walking through a museum of a strange culture –knowing the names of some things but not having any experience with them. At the least, there is a feeling of estrangement here. description of painting The thick paint application in Armstrong’s work is a feature that amplifies that feel of the images and their tactility. Painters speak of the body of oil paint. Armstrong values the touch of his brush and emphasizes a visceral build-up of paint with the palette knife. With a free-flowing improvisation and the employment of painting techniques from finesse glazing to thickly trowelled shaping of abstract patterns, Armstrong has conflated many historical painting styles. Systems of drawing and methods of painting composition are consciously employed alongside sign-painters’ tricks and photographic references. Declarative, bravura paint handling is applied next to carefully glazed areas. Armstrong is exploring a painterly vocabulary, grappling with conventional painterly problems and at the same time raising a question of faith. We can see that the painter doubts that the painting itself can any longer be a sign, by its sheer materiality, for a transcendent spirituality. The technique is too self-conscious for convincing transcendence. But the artist’s doubt is perhaps belied by the obvious care, the craft and intelligent application of technique, the presence of the artist’s hand, which all indicates a faith in the value of painting. This engagement with faithfulness is in the context rather odd. It suggests that in spite of doubts, painting may be acceptable as a tradition to be used; that painting can still function as a metaphorical vehicle for John Armstrong’s engagement with the world. While urging a critique of the conventions of art history and the rhetoric of (male) art, and doing this by using a modestly small (domestic) scale, a domestic and mundane subject matter and employing the minor art form of the still-life, Armstrong is tracing out both a personal and a contemporary sensibility, and affirming the agency of painting as a manner of knowing ourselves in the world. The concerns of art… Whether or not it is the state of mind of the viewer of the insistence of particular works of art, sometimes a fundamental question is posed for the viewer… a question that might be applied as well to other art, but which occurs to us in this situation. What if we were to ask ourselves, in looking at Armstrong’s work, what is the point of art? Is the point, for instance: to entertain, amuse, divert, confuse, defuse, inculcate, educate, edify, mystify, beautify, satisfy, tickle the sensibilities, alienate, make strange, terrorize, socialize. A carefully viewing of the small and dense painted images that Armstrong has composed and constructed in recent years encourages contemplation, conjecture, and speculation of this kind. Daniel Sharp, G101 Artistic Director