MARTHA ARMSTRONG AT BOWERY GALLERY, NOVEMBER 25 – DECEMBER 27, 2025. RECEPTION, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4
The Rhode Island seashore, Vermont woods and Arizona deserts glow with her distinctive verve in Martha Armstrong’s current Bowery Gallery show. Painting from living in those places, in her small Rhode Island canvases she gives the sea’s sweep, sand, and salt air, while her large Vermont landscapes are of shapes alive with moving light and shade, bringing the forest present, growing and fermenting. The colors in her Tucson desert are hard and soft in the extraordinary light of that place with its jagged dark mountains, iron green cactus and shimmering glittering open spaces.
Born 1940 and raised in the Midwest—Cincinnati, Ohio–Armstrong didn’t see the ocean until she was 18 and got dragged bare-foot over tearing barnacles into its blood-tasting water at Newport by her 3-year- old charge. Awed and delighted by it like her hero Edwin Dickinson, she’s painted it ever since at Quonochontaug, Rhode Island just above Westerly, working fast in sand winds on small canvases she tapes down against that wind, capturing for an instant the water’s restless colors, wrack, the shoals, the beach.
About her Vermont paintings, Vermont is a half-hour north of her home in Hatfield, Massachusetts. She paints the orchard hill she looks out on from her studio in West Dummerston. To the flat-lander she was and remains, New England was a surprise– the Holyoke Range of lumpy mountains, soft rolling meadows, tall pines the Royal Navy masted their ships with, the colors she discovered when she got to Smith College in Northampton and met all together and all at once red maples, scarlet oaks, golden birch and beeches, the jagged evergreens. In 1969 she built a bare-bones studio on a scrap of woodlot above Brattleboro. She’s painted there ever since. Plumbing came in 1995. Internet is iffy.
In her desert scenes from Tucson there’s the implacable sun, the rocks and the invulnerable plants–hard, spiked, straight-up and twisting, the pale orange sand on the flat, the dark colors of the mountains across the valley Tucson is, and the sky. It is the sky that captures her first, the clouds, the violent colors of sunsets close enough to touch, saguaros spaced like soldiers marching beyond the porch she paints on.
She goes to her studio every day. To work. To play.
Armstrong has been showing at Bowery Gallery—“my community”—since 1988 with more than a dozen solo shows. She says, “A painting should have a sequential feel to it, something that could happen over time. It can be the exploration of an idea, or something you imagine, but is an exploration. You can hear the mind working in a painting by Matisse. You can feel the drive in Picasso—the unstoppable expression. It has a heartbeat, it has a rhythm, it has a pulse, it is alive. A wall painting from Knossos has that, a Braque still life has that. It’s not different over the centuries.”
[From “Some Conversations with and about Martha Armstrong, Painter,” 2010]
Roberta Smith in the New York Times:
“Her shapes also maintain a nearly sculptural independence, hovering slightly above the image, just beyond legibility. At once improvisational and carefully carpentered, these paintings explode toward the eye, like nature on first sight, at its most welcoming and irrepressible.”
[“Art in Review,” September 25, 2015]
Alexi Worth:
“Armstrong takes a subject that ought to be fatigued—the Yankee woods, the Mediterranean coast—and gives it unexpected freshness. How does she do it? Part of the answer is spatial clarity: whether it’s a branch, a shrub, or a meadow, Armstrong makes each form feel carpentered, solid, touchable. She plants her tree trunks like telephone poles, and folds the most hard-to-pin-down-motifs—waving branches and clouds—into odd, exact origami shapes. The same discipline is present in her color, which is both specific and exaggerated, attentive and inventive. And yet all this decision-making happens at highspeed, executed by a skidding, racing, exuberant brush. The result is that the jagged bright spaces of these paintings are both forceful and invigoratingly open. Craft disappears into excitement, and we are left with a complicated pleasure that feels as simple as walking outside.”
[Walter Wickiser Gallery exhibition catalog, “Martha Armstrong,” November, 1997]
Margaret Skove:
“Her language is abstracted realism where forms, composition, color and light have an often undefined relationship to optical reality, although in every work you know she is experiencing the same landscape view at the same time as she is creating the drawing or painting. Armstrong’s style is abstraction with recognizable realism equivalency, so the term “abstracted realism” indicates that this is not a likeness, it is a form, color and light reinterpretation of an experienced landscape.
“Abstraction takes in the entire picture plane, every inch of the area having the same sense of immediacy, composed to give the viewer opportunity to become involved through movement, the rhythm of a free-flowing brushstroke of color, contra-punctual forces connecting through form elements, such as diagonals, and the density of affinities between colors.”
[Blanden Art Museum exhibition catalog, “Martha Armstrong Landscapes,” 2014]