A powerful series of 11 paintings on display at O’Neill Library depict meditations on the Iraq War, according to the artist, Mary Armstrong of BC's Fine Arts Department. 

“The slow, inexorable march to war was unavoidable,” according to an excerpt from her exhibition introduction. “The White House started to beat the drums, Congress debated, and the media related these events in the 24-hours-a-day news cycle.”  

Armstrong, who has taught painting at Boston College since 1989, has exhibited her work widely and received numerous professional honors and awards. She discussed "24 Hour News" in a Q&A with the Boston College Chronicle.

Mary Armstrong
Mary Armstrong (Lee Pellegrini)

In what ways are the works in this exhibition a departure from your artistic style?
These are predominately paintings created specifically in response to the Iraq War [which began in March 2003] and images from that war. Up until then I was working with imagery that connected nature to the human body. I was and am interested in exploring images of transformation and transfiguration. After I finished the “24 Hour News” series, I began to explore painting vast open spaces, filled with atmosphere and light. The painting “Launch,” the final in the “24 Hour News” series, begins the return to light and air in the movement away from the earth, sailing up into the troposphere. [Armstrong had an exhibition, titled “Troposphere @ 12 Kilometers of Heaven” in 2014 at the Maine Center for Contemporary Art.]

Over how long a period of time were these paintings produced, and is there a progression in the works, to represent the war as it went on? 
The dark blue paintings are the earliest and are part of a series painted during the period just after September 11, 2001. The paintings are of exposed organs, meditations on the vulnerability of the human body to violence. Then, as the drums of war were beating in earnest in 2002-03 and images from the war started to enter my consciousness, the work began to respond to that. The color red came to dominate the work. From 2003 to 2006 responding to the war continued to be unavoidable. Then “Launch” finished the series with a release.

Painting by Mary Armstrong
Painting by Mary Armstrong (Lee Pellegrini)

Talk about the use of color in these paintings.
Blood is blue until it is spilled. The color red is “intense enough to burnish the seat of the imagination which is where, after all, the symbolic mettle of art had better ring true.” [Quote from a 1990 Art Forum review of Armstrong’s work in a New York City gallery exhibition.]

This exhibition was shown at a Boston gallery in 2006. Why is it important to you to display these works on campus?
I really appreciate the opportunity to show these paintings again, especially to the BC community.  I wonder at our complacency in the face of all the misery and death launched with our “shock and awe” campaign. The genie of instability and carnage will not go back into the bottle. This has become a war without end, a terrifying prospect. 

What do you hope to convey to viewers through these works?
Please first look at the pictures and know that whatever you find there is the right thing. The painter’s improvisations in the studio evolve into intentions in the gallery. This is just the starting point. All is experiment and discovery. Nothing is fixed. Or, as [German artist] Max Ernst said, “Art is the magisterial eruption of the irrational.” I am not trying to stir action. I would rather inspire a more meditative view. Paintings are riddles that have no solution. This allows all the energy the painter put into them to continue to resonate. 

What feedback have you gotten from students and other BC community members? 
I am not on campus this semester so I am not able to know how students think about the paintings. I like to imagine a student – nose in book, studying – and then glancing up at the wall and letting the mind wander into a painting without judgment or a pressing need to figure anything out. In other words, to ponder the riddle with an open mind.

–Rosanne Pellegrini | Office of News and Public Affairs