David Armstrong was born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts and attended the Boston Museum School from 1974 to 1977. He spent the next decade working in both New York and Boston before receiving a BFA at Tufts University in 1988. Following this, he worked primarily on black and white portraits; because Armstrong works intuitively, these portraits are personal and intense. The work is forceful yet ephemeral, capturing the essence of the person while inevitably incorporating Armstrong's own spirit.

In the early 1990’s Armstrong began working on landscapes, both as a new stimulus and as a way to relinquish control of the earlier, more rigid images. These landscapes, in soft focus and painterly, also embody the personal and the ephemeral. Like the portraits, they capture the essence of what they are and who Armstrong is; they are both internal and external landscapes. After moving to Berlin in 1992, Armstrong began working in color, and his photographic eye began seeing almost exclusively in color. Discreetly dramatic, these powerful landscapes sneak up on you; the palette is lush, mysterious and sensual.

The work of the last four or five years has become a synthesis of portraiture and landscape; one could not exist without the formal or intuitive elements of the other. The newest work is a series of portraits of trees. These diptychs are simple and eloquent, yet full of the same quiet turbulence, raw beauty, and mercurial emotion that have always been present in Armstrong's work.

Mr. Armstrong has work in the collections of Fotomuseum Winterther, Winterthur, Switzerland; and the De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, USA.