Will Armstrong has spent ten to twenty weekends a year on the road since 2002 — bouncing between gallery openings, art festivals, and his studio in Richmond, Virginia. More than half a million miles through those years, through honky-tonks and movie palaces, cheap motels and majestic theaters, roadside dives and the musicians who pass through them all. The road is not just the subject of his work; it is the method. Every piece of ephemera incorporated into the work is part of the storytelling: vintage sheet music, show posters, maps, stock certificates — these are the substrates on which he draws and paints.
He considers what he does drawing, not painting. Each line is made by hand using a series of pens and Chinese lettering quills, laid over collaged grounds of found paper. Graphite, ink, and acrylic finish the piece. In The Record Store; Vinyl Village, Armstrong's navy ink lines fracture the composition into competing planes—shelving, walls, and the figure's body—while acidic yellows in the lower left corner create chromatic discord against predominant blues and cream. The acrylic red dress anchors the center but reads as almost weightless against the layered detritus of typography, musical notation, and halftone faces that crowd every surface with equal visual pressure. Spatially, the work collapses foreground and background into a flattened collage where vintage theater posters and vinyl sleeves function as both decoration and subject matter, yet the anxious accumulation of historical imagery threatens to bury rather than honor the solitary figure navigating this archive. In Wild Horses, Armstrong layers sepia-toned acrylic washes and black India ink across fragmented typography and cartographic elements, allowing the underlying text to bleed through as a palimpsestic ground that anchors the composition's violent energy. Five horses surge rightward across the picture plane in gestural black lines and charcoal-gray modeling, their manes rendered in explosive calligraphic strokes that overwhelm the orderly grid of the collaged materials beneath. The work's critical tension resides in this collision between constraint and release—the horses' kinetic force simultaneously destructive to and dependent upon the structured ephemera it tramples. In Bull and Bear, Armstrong layers translucent verde-green acrylic across the bull's boxing gloves, allowing the underlying documents—sheet music, currency, vintage posters—to ghost through while the ink-rendered animals remain sharply opaque in the foreground. The bull occupies the left plane with aggressive verticality, while the bear crouches lower and rightward, their bodies compressed within a shallow space crowded by densely packed spectator faces that blur into grayscale wallpaper. The collaged ephemera functions less as nostalgic backing and more as visual static, suggesting that market forces and entertainment narratives are fundamentally inseparable from the contest itself. The influences are as much musical as visual — Bo Diddley, Johnny Cash, and Deke Dickerson sit alongside Frank Miller and the German illustrator Heinrich Kley. The lines of the road and the lines of the pen have become indistinguishable.
He is represented by Jackson Junge Gallery in Wicker Park, Chicago and Crossroads Art Center in Richmond, Virginia. He shows regularly at major art fairs including the One of a Kind Show in Chicago, Coconut Grove Arts Festival in Miami, Winter Park Sidewalk Arts Festival, and Main Street Fort Worth Arts Festival. The Saint Louis Art Fair documented his process in a short film.
The road holds countless stories and in my work, you will find them. Tales of out of the way honky-tonks, movie palaces, cheap motels and barrels of gas paid on questionable credit. Where does music come from? Where does it go to be heard? The lines of the road have become indistinguishable from the lines of the pen.
