Arthur Armstrong

Arthur Armstrong was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim in 1924. He studied Political Science and then Architecture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and subsequently art at Belfast College of Art. There, he met Northern Irish artists Gerard Dillon (1916-1971), George Campbell (1917-1979), and Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974), who would later become his dear friends and important influences. After finishing his studies, Armstrong worked for several years at the Belfast Gas Office as the chief support to his widowed mother, and took on other clerical jobs.

In 1950 Armstrong held his first exhibition at Dublin’s Grafton Gallery. Thereafter, he showed in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, often at the Hendricks Gallery, Dublin, as well as in England, Spain, and the United States. In the 1950s, he emigrated to London where he lived as a lodger in Dillon’s sister’s house. In 1957 he won a Council of Encouragement of Music and Arts (CEMA) travel scholarship to Spain, a country he visited regularly, often with Campbell. In 1962 Armstrong moved to Dublin on a permanent basis. From 1962 he exhibited work at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). In addition to painting, he took on commercial design work, including poster design and set design for the Abbey Theatre. Armstrong won the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal in 1968, he became a member of the RHA in 1972, and in 1981 was elected a member of Aosdána. Armstrong died in Dublin in 1996. Several studio sales of Armstrong’s work were held before and after his death, owing in part to the volume of work he produced. In an interview with the Irish Times in 1972, Armstrong said ‘I keep painting all the time. I paint about three hundred pictures a year – it’s probably prolific in the generation I belong to.’ Armstrong’s work is held by collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA); the Crawford Art Gallery; and the Ulster Museum.

Armstrong was a landscape painter primarily, capturing the West of Ireland and Spain. He also painted and sketched still-life, interiors, and the human figure. His style is influenced by Cubism and he considered himself to be an abstract painter, paying attention to shape and texture in the landscape. He frequently mixed plaster with paint to produce raised sections, lending his work a three-dimensional quality.