Will Armstrong

Will Armstrong, based in Richmond, Virginia, has spent ten to twenty weekends per year on the road since 2002 — between gallery openings, music festivals, and his studio. He has more than half a million miles on a rotating cast of trusted vehicles. The work is the soundtrack to that road trip: songs and the artists who wrote them embedded in the towns that made them famous, honky-tonks and movie palaces and the cheap motels in between.

Armstrong considers his work drawing. Each line is laid down by hand with pens and Chinese lettering quills on a collage of vintage maps, sheet music, show posters, and stock certificates — every piece of paper part of the story. An acrylic wash on top of the drawing gives the work a painterly finish; graphite and ink complete the surface. His named influences include Bo Diddley, Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, and Deke Dickerson alongside Frank Miller, Thomas Nast, and Heinrich Kley.