Valerie Armstrong

Valerie Armstrong is a mixed-media painter working in acrylic and in cold wax and oil. She is based mainly in Woodbridge on the Suffolk coast, and spends her summers at an inherited house in Marie, a medieval mountain village in the Alpes Maritimes, where she has a large studio looking out over the village and the mountains.

Born in Stoke-on-Trent to an army family, she had an itinerant childhood, moving home and school in Britain and abroad often within the year, which left her with a lifelong curiosity about other cultures and a need to travel. She studied textiles at Hornsey College of Art and at Croydon College of Art in the late 1960s, then matiere et espace at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the early 1970s, and took a postgraduate diploma in art therapy at St Albans College of Art.

She practised as an art therapist in psychiatric institutions and schools until her children were born. She later set up a business making and painting folding screens to commission, painting murals and paint effects in clients' homes, and painting and antiquing furniture, and the acquisition of an etching press led to several years as a printmaker. The longing to paint took her to the Art2Life training with Nicholas Wilton in 2016, and from that point painting became her life.

She has shown with Ipswich Art Society and Colchester Art Society at firstsite, at Artspace in Woodbridge, at Blackthorpe Barn with Artworks, and in Marie with Les Artistes de Marie.