49.53 × 67.95 cm
(19 ½ × 26 ¾ inches)
Signed with initials and dated lower right
No. 289
Painted in 1944, Growth and Form is one of John Armstrong's most imaginative wartime paintings. A monumental female figure rises from a landscape filled with spiralling and organic structures. With one arm extended she seems almost to call the surrounding forms into existence, as though presiding over an act of creation.
The painting belongs to a group of works in which Armstrong explored an underlying order within the natural world. These concerns relate to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's celebrated On Growth and Form of 1917, which examined the mathematical and physical principles governing natural structures. Armstrong transforms such ideas into something intensely poetic. The twisting drapery of the central figure itself assumes the character of organic growth while also recalling the great draped figures of classical sculpture.
Natural evolution, human creation and the inheritance of antiquity are brought together within a single image. There are affinities with Henry Moore, whose fascination with the monumental and draped figure was similarly indebted to ancient sculpture, but Armstrong's vision remains entirely his own, mysterious, theatrical and richly imaginative.
The date is important. Armstrong painted Growth and Form in 1944, while Europe was still being destroyed. Against destruction he sets creation. Nature grows, evolves and regenerates, while the ancient past survives and is remade. Even the innumerable touches of tempera seem to accumulate into larger forms, as though the picture itself were being generated before our eyes.
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