Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Justin Armstrong. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Justin, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
Hundreds of small painting study experiments in college and after! I have nearly all of that photo documented and organized on my computer. They’re essentially journal entries of procedural growths and occasional eurekas. The earliest small experiments contained 1 to 3 large brushstrokes; I seriously wanted to start somewhere near zero in terms of abstract art composition. Early on I decided that I liked distinguishing marks and colors from one another so that any blending or blurring would stem from our eyes dealing with it all. The smaller the shape or the sharper I wanted edges to be, the more I need to learn how to use masking tape. Fast-forward a few years, and now some of my artwork push several thousand distinct gestures based on patterns or semi-random color choices. You could compare the progression of my art process to a steady increase in resolution, like a computer screen has pixels.
The clear challenges with using holographic vinyl has been adhering acrylic paint to it and it’s own adhesion to surfaces. There really isn’t a manual for how I’m using it since its an auto industry product. There’s A LOT of trial and error, but it’s absolutely worth it because I feel like I’m entering a space ripe for exploration.
Looking back at the development over time, I think I handled the process well: paint, fail or succeed based on my introspective reaction to the art, take notes (thoughts, questions, etc), and then repeat the process.
Justin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Justin Armstrong, and I’m a professional artist who makes optically intense abstract painting. I earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in Painting from Savannah College of Art & Design in 2016 and 2020, respectively. I’ve been a fulltime studio artist since 2020 making art on a commission basis and also selling through my website. I currently live in Leeds, AL but travel to Savannah and Atlanta relatively often.
Optical interplay between paint and light are at the forefront of my painting practice. Those two things have really interesting effects on our eyes when placed extremely close together. One can visually redefine the other right before your eyes. As a whole I want my paintings to be explosions of pattern-rich, colorful, light-reflective complexity. I’m working on developing the term “insoluble seeing” as a description of what my work does to the viewer. I like to think of it as trying to make someone perceive a Polaroid and a glitchy computer screen at the exact same time. They’re also particularly difficult to photograph because of this!
90’s nostalgia is a heavy influence: holographic Pokémon cards, blocks of Lego, cartoons, anime, Game Boys, tube TVs, old computer monitors, etc. Video games and screen technology have changed so much throughout my life, and I’ve been keen on the visual progressions, even before pursuing an art career. In a way I see my work “increasing in resolution” like video games and TVs have. Where that goes is likely into Seurat territory, especially if and when I bring portraiture and landscape painting into the picture.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Part of the beauty is that the rewarding aspect has personally developed over my lifetime. It evolves as my needs and interests do. Art for me between 9 and 17 years old was an escape from school bullying. I could dive into my own creative world with its own rules, and technical proficiency at drawing helped me feel validated and empowered. The creative pursuit since starting college has been about knowledge expansion, artistic media exploration, and deep introspection synthesizing towards something powerfully authentic. As I get older, I crave a hyper focus on the relationship between the why, what, and how of what I do. It isn’t an escape from external mistreatment like earlier in life. Its now a fun, semi-scientific cycle of introspection and external response, over and over as I create more.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
There’s a void (for lack of a better word) in the world that creatives are uniquely sensitive to and seek to fill. I say “void” because we feel compelled to express outward into the world things that weren’t there before. Even being derivative, something is new to a degree. This void pulls as much as we want to give – maybe more, maybe less. It can pull our entire lives, arise at some point, or decline. We all have different ways of expressing and different personal reasons. We value and leverage our senses differently. It can be musical, visual, culinary, social, etc. It can be heavily cerebral, emotional, psychological, political, etc.
Even though I don’t have kids, there are some clear parallels to this and the desire and need to have children – to watch them grow, to personally feel a contribution to society, to continue your family’s heritage, to watch them succeed, to see what and whom they grow to love, and a lot more. Making art – in every form – isn’t entirely different. Creatives tend to feel the need to create, contribute, support, and manifest by leveraging common abstractions like perception, aesthetic beauty, design principles, engineering, problem solving, chaos, social issues, taste, etc. Art shares the artist’s DNA but in different ways. Art enters and effects lives, and its meaning evolves with time. My paintings will age and I won’t see them the same in 10 years. I can forget how they were made and see them as themselves instead of a memory cluster of “what I did”. They kind of are my kids. Hopefully that makes sense.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://justinarmstrong.net
- Instagram: @justinarmstrong.artist
