The source materials for the photographs in this series are re-worked master drawings, largely from the Renaissance. The artist’s many layered process of reproduction and blurring, appropriating an image and subjecting it to a series of manipulations (photocopying, cutting, painting, re-photographing) transforms the original images, giving them a new meaning in a new context — a renaissance of the Renaissance, if you will.
The original drawings were attempts to capture the human figure in a specific action, either from Biblical, mythological, or historical scenes, but the rough sketches were removed from the milieu of the larger whole. Armstrong’s process accentuates that extraction, removing them further from their context and adding a new psychology of color to the achromatic drawings.