oil on canvas, 34"x34" - 1977ish,
when I was a kid, my parents had a bunch of oil paintings by someone named 'D. Armstrong' around the house. The way I understand it, someone my dad worked with had run into a kind of money trouble, owned a bunch of these paintings1 and needed to sell them in a hurry; my Dad ended up buying them. If this sounds weird and shady it probably was but I wasn't born at the time so I got all this secondhand.
Almost all of the paintings were various idyllic pastoral scenes depicting central valley California, except two of them - this one and another which both depict a winged creature flying across a landscape. This one (labelled on the back of the canvas) 'Nazgul returning to Barad Dur'. The other was a mostly barren landscape and I believe was the nazgul flying over the dead marshes.
I love the idea of this dude from like San Luis Obispo painting mostly California farmland throughout the 60's and 70's but dropping in some Lord of the Rings to spice it up now and then.
1 - Some versions of this story as they were told to me included the seller being the artist, but I do not believe that is the case
acrylic polymer emulsion on hardboard, 21" x 21"
a very purely aesthetic appreciation. endless vibes, rigid geometry, midcentury nostalgia. i could stare at that beautiful ocean for days.
"Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth
Learned about this in, of all things, Preacher, where a character comments on seeing this painting in a book and saying "my God. Someone's painted my life."
the sense of madness and horror this painting inspires haunts me