James Armstrong, or “Jim” as he is better known, is an award winning and highly acclaimed “impressionist representational” artist who hails from Scarborough, Tobago, in Trinidad and Tobago. In 2024, he was awarded the Trinidad and Tobago Hummingbird Medal Gold for Art and Community Service, which was the latest of numerous commendations for his art.

Jim started painting in his early teens and was a founding member of the Tobago Art Group when it was established in 1961. He held his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Scarborough Library. A piece from that exhibition – “Making Copra,” - was part of the Trinidad and Tobago contingent exhibition at Expo ’67 in Montreal Canada. “Making Copra” and many of his later works are in the collection of the National Museum and Art Gallery and are displayed homes and boardrooms, both locally and internationally. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in various countries, with the last six being in Trinidad and Tobago.

While being an established artist, Jim also earned a degree in environmental design from the renowned Parsons School of Art and Design, in New York. He also studied design in Canada and eventually pursued a MSc in Urban and Regional Planning at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, in New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Planning at the University of Nairobi, Kenya.

He has had a distinguished career spanning over 25 years at the United Nations and has worked in several countries around the world. Throughout his extensive travels, Jim found time to paint and exhibit in several countries including Canada, USA, Brazil, and many in the Caribbean and Africa. He took early retirement from the UN in 2000 to devote himself entirely to his art.

In recent years, Jim has been experimenting with new materials, techniques and styles, including works on copper and coated aluminum. While he is well known for vibrantly colored dance movements and heavily textured artworks, he does not like to be pigeonholed and continues his quest for innovations in his art.