Growing up in the 1950s, Timaru-based artist Mike Armstrong developed a social conscience early due to his mother’s difficult upbringing. “She had had a traumatic childhood, in poverty and with abuse that she referred to only obliquely, only talking about it directly late in life, when death was imminent,” he says. He has always been sensitive to injustice, troubled by the vulnerability of the marginalised to exploitation by the powerful.
“From very early on, say from the age of seven or so, my art became noticed, and I became noticed because of it, mainly at school,” he recalls. “I won art prizes all my school career, which attracted very little attention at home. Doing well at art at my school didn’t achieve much either, as art was considered as somewhat a waste of time, unlike rugby or cricket.
“Those art prizes did convince me to keep going,” he says. “In my sixth-form year, the art teacher, Mr Noonan, suggested I enter a work in an Italian show of architectural art. I combined imagery from Pier Luigi Nervi’s curved concrete forms into a painting and it was accepted and exhibited. That was 1969 or 1970, but I have no record; the school made no comment, and the work never came back.”
It’s a familiar story of the time, with a familiar resolution. Armstrong went on to study at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in Christchurch under the Lithuanian (originally East Prussian) artist Rudolf Gopas. “My mother wanted me to become an architect. My father wanted me to go into forestry. I didn’t have the maths for the first, and I got cancer and avoided the second, using it as leverage to avoid forestry school,” he recalls. “I got into art school with my drawing skills at a time when drawing was supposedly being replaced by photocopying and other mechanical means. At art school I finally met people like me and felt I was in the right place.”
After graduating in 1976, Armstrong focussed on honing his artmaking skills and testing ideas, without exhibiting much. “Gopas always gets the blame for my style,” he jokes, “but then where did the years of constructivist work come from? Bill Sutton gave up on me. Don Peebles, Doris Lusk, Quentin Macfarlane, Philip Trusttum all influenced the early years. Ted Bracey had a strong influence, as he taught art theory, and that was fairly political, and I saw that politics and social issues could get in there pretty directly. Although he was a formalist, I suppose one might say, I valued his comments. He and Gopas fought vociferously in the studios.”
Armstrong’s painting at this time was abstract and expressionistic, full of gestural brushwork – very much the Canterbury style exemplified by that Gopas-taught generation of which Tony Fomison, Philip Clairmont and Allen Maddox were the illustrious troika of enfants terribles. Armstrong’s loose, shaped canvases had something of Don Peebles’ constructivism and a little Frank Stella about them.
In 1984, Armstrong won the prestigious Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, which brought his paintings and sculptures to broader attention in Aotearoa’s nascent art scene. It was a heady time, with money and attention flying around, and careers could be made overnight. Armstrong found his vibe in colour. “Colour pushes and pulls surfaces,” he says, “and I played games with abstractions and depth. I made sculptures in order to cover them with paint. Eventually I began incorporating more painterly narratives. I was aware of what was going on globally, and I travelled to Australia to look at painting and the biennales. The political paintings, sculptural and conceptual art we saw there did influence what I did. How painting incorporated activism really struck me, and even influenced my teaching later.”
Armstrong started as an art tutor at the Aoraki Polytechnic in Timaru in 1994, where he taught for many years. South Canterbury supports a small but lively art scene that connects with those in Oamaru and Ashburton, and as far afield as Christchurch and Dunedin. Timaru is a major port, but it’s also the service town for the farming heartland of the South Island. Cows and rivers. The artist became increasingly interested in making work that brought attention to the plight of the natural world.
“Environmentalism came from an awareness of my own industrial poisoning and cancer in the early 70s. With some irony I note that I’ve progressed from radiotherapy to chemotherapy over 50 years, although the chemotherapy is actually used to treat rheumatoid arthritis effectively now,” he says. “I started by painting the dairy waste pipes and the bright green ponds of effluent around South Canterbury in the late 90s. They’ve gone now, or they’re better hidden.”
These days, environmentalism is a central theme for the artist. “Now,” he says, “the relevance of the environmental issues is not the arguments of denial, of belief versus science, but just simply that it is ignored. There’s something strangely psychological in that, when the science is overwhelming, and the physical effects are noticeable globally, that the wealthy nations cannot afford to back off. I look more at that now, how to express that in paint. Is it some form of murderous impulse, or suicidal? Meanwhile, I can only paint and comment on my use of plastic paint, toxic industrial materials, environmental issues. We excuse ourselves weakly and carry on.”
This is art with an important message, transmitted through Armstrong’s powerful sense of colour and idiosyncratic vocabulary of cartoonish figuration, staring eyes, toxic waves and social-media trolls. The artist has always been ahead of the game and remains clear-eyed about the threats to our fragile world, tackling the effluent, ignorance and oligarchs with the same vigour with which Francisco Goya took on the horror of war, and the darkness of religious superstition and a medieval social order.
Getting older and what that means for an artist and their career is rarely talked about in the art world. An art practice can be a physically demanding thing, and that can take a toll on a body. “I’ve always looked to extend painting; paint on 3D surfaces,” says Armstrong. “But now I’ve settled, as an older artist, much less physically able, on flat and basically rectangular surfaces. I’ve had arthritis for years, and it has affected my artmaking greatly.”
Exhibitions too are few and far between. “Whereas I showed in Auckland and Wellington frequently in the 1980s, the economy has become much less conducive. Age is a bugger. Ten years of arthritic pain has slowed me down. The art world has moved on, the big battles around painting were somewhat resolved at some point in the past. I moved to Timaru, and it is difficult to get one’s head over the parapet from here.” And yet, he forges on. “I’ll stick to painting what I paint for now.”
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