The woman in the elegant, understated full-length gown leans a little tentatively into the horizon with her back to the viewer, facing the brooding storm clouds looming in the distance. She doesn’t seem threatened by the unsettled atmosphere. She’s maintaining her poise despite the uncertainty and there’s something reassuring — possibly a little hopeful — about that. That kind of subtle but resonant emotion runs consistently through Asheville painter Alicia Armstrong’s work.
Her paintings been described as dream-like for their ethereal imagery — a solitary red boat tossed in a suggestion of a sea; hazy shapes buried under fields of color. But dream-like shouldn’t be interpreted as wispy or unsubstantial. It is rather an openness that invites in the viewer to whatever emotional response comes to the surface.
A graduate of UNC Asheville, Armstrong started out over a decade ago painting portraits and strongly representational work. Through the years, she says, she gradually abandoned the certainty of the detailed human form and drifted loose, letting her work flow more freely. In the light-filled, 3,000-square-foot River Arts District studio space where she’s worked since 2011, her work has continued to evolve: a darker palette and the juxtapositioning of people and objects in unexpected ways. They appear buried under layers, blurred around the edges, haunting and curious. The slender hooded figure in black, the umbrellas, lanterns, wings and other means of conveyance — they reoccur frequently in Armstrong’s paintings, emerging from murky backgrounds, enigmatic and often a little melancholy.
Don’t read too much into the figures that anchor her paintings or the objects around them, though, says Armstrong. They bubble up from the subconscious and have come to rest in her work, but they don’t necessarily represent the artist or anyone else, real or imagined. They provide a balance to the layers and texture of background; they focus the viewer’s eye and focus the painter as she works. And while they add a narrative element to her work, they don’t have a narrative of their own. The boat which turns up in so many of her paintings may represent transition, movement, a passage from one state of being to the next. But it’s also just a lovely shape, says Armstrong, identifiable in what’s often an indistinct backdrop. Overthinking or intellectualizing the work isn’t her style. “In art, as in love, instinct is enough,” the writer Anatole France once said. That describes Armstrong’s approach to work— it’s tempered by experience and skill but driven by intuition.
More appealing than adding a narrative to those figures is adding texture to the background, says Armstrong. Working with oils, graphite and charcoal on wooden board, she builds up layers, painting, writing in graphite, painting over it, sanding and painting over it again. When the painting is close to done, she adds a layer of varnish, leaving the surface incredibly smooth to the touch. That very tactile result is one of the artist’s favorite parts of the whole process.
Whether they are more abstract or include narrative imagery, there’s a very soft, but strong emotional thread running through Armstrong’s work. “I don’t presume to do so, but like all artists, I hope I make people feel,” she says. It’s a sense of “tenderness” that she hopes to convey, and if the work succeeds in touching the heart, it has achieved that goal.
Amstrong’s paintings can be found at Gallery Seventeen in Greenville, SC, Portfolio Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, Atelier Gallery in Charleston, SC, Eno Gallery in Hillsborough, NC and Gregg Irby Fine Art in Atlanta, GA.
See more of Alicia Armstrong’s work online at aliciaarmstrongchatham.com.