Alison Armstrong — writer, painter

Alison Armstrong’s writings includes a literary cookbook, "The Joyce of Cooking" (Station Hill Press, 1986) and a volume of textual scholarship, “'The Herne’s Egg'” by W.B. Yeats: The Manuscript Materials (Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). She holds an M.A. in English Lit. (thesis on Yeats and Joyce) from Ohio State, an M.Litt. from Oxford University, UK (thesis textual scholarship on late play of Yeats held in National Library of Ireland, Dublin), and a Ph.D. in Comparative Lit. from NYU (dissertation on Joyce and Roland Barthes). Her essays and reviews have appeared since the 1970s in "A Wake Newslitter," "Irish Literary Supplement," "James Joyce Literary Supplement," "American Arts Quarterly," and short fiction and poetry have been published in "BOMB" magazine, "Exquisite Corpse," "James Joyce Broadsheet," "Mid-American Review," "PN Review," etc. A one act play, “Ismene,” – in a projected series of staged monologues — was published in "Notre Dame Review" (Summer 2009). From 2018 to 2020, she published & illustrated 5 books with Xlibris, "Gazelle: 9 Monologues," "Healing Fictions: Assorted Essays," "Pentimenti: Selected Memoirs," "The Pen-Ultimate Word: Re-views & Inter-views," and "Two Fables." She taught literature and essay writing in colleges and art schools from 1970 to 2021.
Her paintings and small sculptures have been exhibited since 1980 and are held in various private collections. In 2002, she was an active exhibitor with Japanese Artists Association of NY. In the early 2000s, she studied abstract calligraphy/sumi e with Koho Yamamoto. Her visual art is influenced by Japanese ink painting techniques including Nihonga, and her oil on canvases often have textured gold surfaces or explore light effects on the Hudson River. She taught a course of her own design, "The History of Color Theory: Aristotle to the Electric Circus" for 5 semesters at The New School and a version of it for the Art History dept. at SVA beginning and ending with pure colored light including the experiments of Newton, Goethe, and Turrel. She is now reorganizing her materials for a book about the various attitudes toward color in science and art.