WAYNE ARMSTRONG: BETWEEN HERE AND THERE
Manna Gallery
It is almost incomprehensible to us today, but landscape paintings a genre or subject idid not exist in European art until fairly recently—a few hundred years ago—until the Romantic era. Before then, the natural world was seen as a stage set for various holy or allegorical dramas, but gradually the backdrop came to the fore as scientific rationalism prevailed over religious mystery, and individualism superseded communitarianism, to the displeasure of the novelist Leo Tolstoy, who saw art’s role as fostering religious feeling, and the critic John Ruskin, who coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to attack the ‘falseness’ of aesthetic subjectivity.
The title of Wayne Armstrong’s landscape painting show, Between Here and There, may remind viewers of Tolkien’s subtitle for The Hobbit, or Paul Klee’s definition of a kine as a dot that went for a walk. It also defines the traditional esthetic view of art as an adventurous journey through obstacles an trials. Armstrong’s dozen-plus oils on canvas, all made in 2025, take the viewer on a journey into the California landscape that inspired them—note the blue and gold palette—and, the artist’s mind, perceiving and organizing the overwhelming and contradictory sensory data of real life into maps of painterly emotion. The Oakland artist, now retired after a long career teaching art, and impressively prolific, expresses what many Bay Areans feel about our famously scenic region: “How lucky am I to always find something in these e environments to inspire me.”
Armstrong’s commitment to inspiration and the painting process place him within the Abstract Expressionist tradition, but his interest in landscape allies him with the Bay Area Figuration artists who returned to examining and interpreting the external world; Richard Diebenkorn, for example, felt that pure attraction had become too easy: a trap for creative sterility. The medium-sized and large paintings presented here may have their roots in what some art viewers consider the “creed outworn”—to quote or misquote Wordsworth—of modernist painting, but Armstrong’s landscapes/mindscapes, with their almost geological slipping planes and metamorphic structures echoing Cézanne, de Kooning, Guston, and Thiebaud, belie the dictates of art fashion and marketing.
While some of the paintings are entitled to suggest specific locations (“Hidden Valley,” “White Bridges Road”), the majority of the titles. including “Between Here and There,” “That Lies Between,” “The Surrealist Picnic,” “Not San Andreas Fault,” “A Collection of Ethereal Thoughts,” and “Proverbial Setting” (or “They Promised Us Better Gods 5-8”)
playfully assert their independence from traditional realism with imaginatively extrapolated images striking in their aesthetic reality and rightness. The artist who created “A Landscape Indifferent to the Rules” can only have done so by imbibing the rules so completely that violating them in order to pursue an internal vision without plunging into chaos became not only possible, but a kind of artistic mandate.
Armstrong’s ostensibly aerial views of the landscape, with the horizon lines and swaths of sky raised to the top of the paintings, render the ground planes composing most of the canvas a field—both literally and metaphorically—for improvisation; they suggest geologic cross-sections as well as quilts or magic lands of counterpane, or manuscripts and maps—or all of the above. There is the relative realism of the rocky cliffs in “A Collection of Ethereal Thoughts” and “What Lies Between” and the verdant foothills of “Not San Andreas Fault” loosens into the jumble of hillocks of “Hidden Valley.” More abstracted, ambiguous landscapes emerge in the virtuosic works, “A Landscape Indifferent to the Rules,” “Between Here and There,” “The Surrealist Picnic,” and “White Bridges Road,” each one an aesthetic adventure. Wherever you go, there you are, as the folk wisdom of the 1970s intoned.