Martha Armstrong at Bowery - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Each individual of Martha Armstrong's paintings has its beginnings in an exactly drawn depiction of the view from her studio window. The finished works nevertheless differ a beneficial deal from each other. The more individual looks at these paintings, the more intriguing they become: always a similar underlying drawing, still always a different completed picture. It is as admitting she had pointed a kaleidoscope at the window and twisted her wrist for a like reason that with each turn a different image took shape.

Charles Burchfield, a painter who is admired by means of Armstrong and who may have influenced her, wrote down in his diary a certain quantity of thoughts about the nature of landscape: "You cannot experience a landscape until you have known of its discomforts. You have to fight, anathematize the mosquitoes, be slapped by dint of stinging branches, fall over stones and skin your knees, be stung by means of nettles, scratched by grasshopper grass, and pricked by means of brambles before you have experienced nature." It is real that Armstrong may have experienced nature framed through windows and thus have avoided the discomforts referr to through Burchfield, yet dangers manage to lie hid in her paintings. Her forms grasp individual another like talons, or they coalesce. They are like unwound turns of bandages, or they wave loosely like pennons; a certain quantity of forms appear to be snipped on the outside as though with tin shears. In a certain quantity of paintings the impetuosity of her brushwork have the appearances to have produced gashes--great gaping wounds

It is as if in each of these canvases there are sum of two units Armstrongs at work, one who makes the drawing and another who makes the painting. In the larger works abundant of the underlying drawing survives the onslaught of the next to the first painterly phase. The smaller canvases take care of to nonobjective forms. In all of them single makes out the roof of a cabin stretching on the outside obliquely in perspective. It reminded me of the gray shape rising from the floor in Holbein's painting The Ambassadors in London's National Gallery. When seen from a side angle, this strange gray form move rounds into a skull.

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