Christopher Armstrong

Christopher Armstrong (b. 1967) is an American realist painter who specializes in portraying the ocean in all its vagaries and vicissitudes. His paintings are often so realistic that one can almost feel the roll of the waves and the spray of the surf, and his love of the sea is reflected in oversized works that seem to mimic the vastness of the oceans themselves. Working in a tradition that stretches from the great nineteenth-century marine painters through his own artistic lineage, Armstrong has established himself as a distinctive contemporary voice within American realism.

Armstrong studied painting and art history in Florence, Italy before receiving his BA from Bucknell University. He went on to earn his MFA from New York University, where he won the school's MVP award and exhibited at Washington Square East Galleries. He now lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, one of the most historically rich fishing communities on the American East Coast and a place with a long tradition of inspiring marine painters, with his wife Tatiana and their daughter Lily.

Alongside his own practice, Armstrong co-presides over North Mountain Press, a fine art publishing company specializing in the work of his late father, the American realist David Armstrong. His work was selected for the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies Exhibition, an important recognition of his contribution to contemporary American painting. His pictures continue to bring the discipline of classical technique into conversation with a deeply personal vision of the sea as both subject and site of ongoing meditation.

"Chris Armstrong paints with the grace and confidence of considerable training and well-distilled purpose. Armstrong's pictures are most agreeable to look at, but he has, in addition, both a conscience and a nervously weird eye on the world and its people. The who, and where that he offers are isolated, quietly perilous, and subconsciously full of warning. They are also alive and ever so slightly promising of connection and hope. Armstrong has a unique and dangerously honest vision, and he renders it with disarming precision."

—Frederick G. Dillen, author of Hero and Fool

"Every day, I have contact with the ever-changing dynamics of the ocean. I paint the sea not only as I see it but as I think it. The process of creative production requires one to be disciplined, specifically with regards to generating and focusing of energy."

—Chris Armstrong