Armstrong is a multi-award-winning painter and sculptor, who held the Frances Hodgkin’s Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1984. Working as an artist continuously for over fifty years, he has exhibited nationally and internationally. He was a tertiary art lecturer. He is well respected nationally for his drawing, painting and sculpture, and his work is held in many important national and public collections. Colour and humour, politics and social commentary dominate the artist’s work. As an expressive painter, he carefully crafts layers of meaning into translucent paint and drawing, forming a dialogue of ideas. These are skillfully interwoven with layers of gestural paint and textured surfaces. On one level these paintings are metaphorical and narrative; western culture, capitalism and industry hell bent on self-destruction, of another civilization running its course, exhausting itself, pulling itself apart, the fundamentals of eternal expansion reaching their limits; on another level, it is the subconscious of the dream. Beauty, danger, and playfulness are contrasted, joy and human optimism are real despite the urgent and complex demands of survival, and this art reflects these polarities.