50.8 × 73.7 cm
(20 × 29 inches)
Signed with initials and dated lower left
No. 261
Painted in 1943, Shells and Sun is one of the most beautiful and original early expressions of a new manner Armstrong developed during the war. He increasingly constructed his painted surfaces from separate square-ended touches of colour, allowing the darker ground to remain visible between them and creating a distinctive shimmering effect.
Here the imagery is reduced to elemental forms: sun, land, sea and shells. The great spiralling shells are simultaneously natural objects and abstract structures, suggesting an underlying order within organic life. An apparently simple object becomes the starting point for a much larger chain of ideas.
These concerns relate to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's celebrated On Growth and Form of 1917, which examined the mathematical and physical principles underlying natural structures, including the spiral formation of shells. Armstrong transforms such ideas into something intensely poetic. There is almost a creation myth here, with sun, sea, earth and organic life brought together in a mysterious elemental landscape.
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