Junardi Armstrong

Junardi Armstrong is an eclectic artist and published writer who has worked and lived in Arizona for over 35 years. A former educator with an M.A. from the University of Arizona, she began learning art as a healing tool around 1995 and began to create seriously in 2001. Her grandmother was a fine artist whose work inspired her from childhood. Today, she explores multi media with watercolor being one of the most challenging. Her watercolors have been representational for the most part as she learns the skills. “I love the translucency of watercolor, the light and energy that the white paper underneath gives to a painting.”

Junardi learned basket weaving from a Tohono O’Odham woman named Juanita Ahill, handmade papermaking with Katherine Nash, watercolor with Bruce McGrew, Deanna Thibeault and Joanne Garry, handmade book and box making with Mabel Dean and Curt Dornberg, collage with Josh Goldberg and Pat Marohn, and apprenticed with Juan Quesada of Mata Ortiz in clay. Each skill informs whatever work she does. Her work can be found in many private collections as well as the University of Arizona Library of rare books special collections. Last year she returned to watercolor in a class with Vicki Wills and a workshop with Tim Clark.

Junardi’s work has been shown in various galleries and exhibits in Southern Arizona including Details and Design Gallery, Tohono Chul Museum Gallery, Otero Gallery in Tubac, AZ, Tucson Public Library, The Tucson Artists Cooperative Gallery, Womankraft Gallery, and Details and Green Shoelaces Gallery. She is a juried member of the Southern Arizona Watercolor Guild, and PaperWorks; the Sonoran Collective of Paper and Book Artists, as well as a former member of Paper Portals collaborative whose work “Portals on Camino de Oeste” won the “best collaborative book” in the Tohono Chul paper arts show called Bound and Unbound in 2005. Tucson Home Magazine’s fall 2007 issue featured her as a paper artist. Her artist’s books may be found at: paperworks.info and in the rare books special collections library at the University of Arizona. A variety of her work will be shown at the Ranch House Gallery of Agua Caliente Park in Tucson from October 8-November 18th 2008.

You can contact Junardi by e-mail.

Forest Sentinel
matted print
16 x 12 inches
$35 matted; $95 framed

A special old growth tree on Mount Lemmon

Citrus Still
watercolor on paper
image 16 x 12 inches

A still life done in Tim Clark's 2007 workshop

Old Road to Finger Rock
watercolor on paper
20½ x 26½ inches framed
$375 framed

River Rock
matted print
16 x 20 inches
$35