Continuing through February 14, 2026
It is almost incomprehensible to us today, but landscape paintings as a genre did not exist in European art until fairly recently, with the arrival of 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gradually the backdrop came to the fore as scientific rationalism prevailed over religious mystery, and individualism superseded communitarianism. Leading cultural figures, not just theological conservatives, expressed their displeasure. Novelist Leo Tolstoy saw art’s role as fostering religious feeling; and the critic John Ruskin coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to attack the ‘falseness’ of aesthetic subjectivity.
The title of Wayne Armstrong’s landscape painting exhibition, “Between Here and There,” is a play on J.R.R. Tolkien’s subtitle for “The Hobbit,” “There and Back Again.” It is also in the spirit of Paul Klee’s definition of a line as “a dot that went for a walk.” Armstrong’s paintings embrace the aesthetic view that art is an adventurous journey through obstacles and trials.
Armstrong’s dozen-plus paintings (all 2025) indeed take us on a journey into the California landscape that inspired them — note the blue and gold palette. They perceive and organize the overwhelming and contradictory sensory data of real life into maps of painterly emotion. The Oakland artist, now retired after a long teaching career, is impressively prolific, expressing what many Bay Area folk feel about our famously scenic region: “How lucky am I to always find something in these environments to inspire me.”
Armstrong’s commitment to the role of inspiration places him broadly 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 to large paintings presented here have their roots in what some consider the “creed outworn” — to quote William Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” — of modernist painting. But Armstrong’s landscapes, I also refer to them as mindscapes, with their geological slipping planes and metamorphic structures that salute Cézanne, de Kooning, Guston and Thiebaud belie the dictates of aesthetic fashion.
While some of the titles 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” playfully assert their independence from traditional realism with imaginatively extrapolated images that are striking for their aesthetic 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 personal creative mandate.
Armstrong’s ostensibly aerial views, with the horizon lines and swaths of sky raised to the top of the compositions, render the ground planes into a field for improvisation, both literally and metaphorically. They suggest geologic cross-sections as well as quilts, magic lands of counterpane, or manuscripts and maps. From 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,” Armstrong’s brushwork loosens into the jumble of hillocks of “Hidden Valley.” More abstracted, ambiguous landscapes emerge in the virtuosic “A Landscape Indifferent to the Rules,” “Between Here and There,” “The Surrealist Picnic,” and “White Bridges Road,” and each one is indeed an aesthetic adventure. Wherever you go, there you are.
