Worlds collide

It’s late in the evening in Michael James Armstrong’s studio space in Barrio Logan’s Glashaus building, where he’s finishing up his latest work. The red spray paint is dry, but now comes the hard part. With the smallest of X-Acto blades, he finds an edge of the tape under the paint and, with a surgeon’s precision, starts to lift it up. If he pulls too fast or cuts the wrong area, he’ll have to start all over again. The whole process takes about 20 minutes for a 5-by-5-inch area. When he’s finished, the white underneath the red reveals the prize of his labor: a cross.
“It’s an old first-aid box I found at the swap meet,” he says as he pulls up the last of the tape. “But what’s a first-aid box without a cross?”

For more than four years, Armstrong’s been crafting amazingly vivid paintings of surreal cityscapes and art- deco-inspired skyscrapers that are beautiful in their attention to detail. Looking at one, it’s as if you’re on top of one of these buildings, looking out upon Armstrong’s city of the future through animated, lysergic eyes. If he sweats this much over a first-aid cross, imagine the patience that goes into one of his actual pieces.

“I can’t really pinpoint why I like things that are so crisp and clean, because I’m not a really meticulous person, but for some reason, when it comes to my art, it would always have to be clean and balanced,” explains Armstrong, who says he can’t remember exactly when he first became attracted to 1930s-era design. “I think I just gravitated more towards art deco architecture. I’m someone who likes clean, simple design but also decoration.”

But there’s something else there in Armstrong’s paintings—something you can’t immediately put your finger on. Once you learn that he uses spray paint and his canvases are usually steel and aluminum, then it hits you like a freight train. Or, in this case, a subway train.

“If I say that I’m into graffiti as an art, it’s no different than saying I’m into architecture,” he says. “I just appreciate it for what it is.”

More specifically, he’s inspired by the graffiti that lined New York City’s subway cars in the early 1980s, the lettering that was accompanied by arrows and clouds, garish and bright and standing out against the steel.

“There were some people that did consider themselves artists, but a lot of time it was kids who didn’t know shit about art,” Armstrong says. “They didn’t know about color theory. They were just using bright colors so that people would notice it when the train went by.”

It’s easy to assume that Armstrong might relate to these “kids.” He’s been in about 20 shows in the last four years despite not attending art school, a fact that can be shocking at first when looking at pieces like “Metrotham” or “A.D. 15,” with their perfect lines and angles. You’d be tempted to think he might be one of those lucky SOBs who have just the right mix of left- and right-brain thinking, a kid who excelled in every subject in school without really trying and geeked out with equal enthusiasm over Picasso and Pythagoras.

But, in fact, Armstrong was terrible at school and says he barely graduated high school. Raised in Arizona, he moved out here in 2004 without a plan, but he knew he was fairly good at drawing and singing. Once he start to paint, however, his style quickly became revered in the local scene, and now, since switching from acrylic to spray paint and surrounded by like-minded artists within the Glashaus warehouse, his recent pieces are more inspired than ever. He’ll be one of 50 artists featured in Quint Gallery’s new exhibition, Homing In, which opens May 29, and he’s planning on painting an 8-by-40-foot steel wall outside of Glashaus for a show in July.

The amalgamation of the two seemingly different worlds of graffiti and art deco comes naturally to Armstrong, but, more importantly, this implausible marriage of two distinct parts of his personality has resulted in a whole new of painting that somehow looks effortless in its blend of old and new.

“I think when someone’s really in tune with themselves as an artist then their entire personality is in their art,” ha says. “Whatever makes their personality, that’s what their art is. The person that I am, how I grew up and the interests that I have, I just happen to put those two together. I wouldn’t know what else to do or what else to paint because that’s who I am.”