Epiphany Art
Helen Armstrong
Helen Armstrong is a Hove-based printmaker, pastel and digital artist with over sixty years of practice, whose work finds the transcendent beneath the surface of ordinary life.
Mediums: Printmaking · Pastel · Digital drawing · Fabric banners
Themes: Resurrection · Everyday spirituality · The unconscious · Lament
Location: Hove, Sussex, UK
Not currently accepting commissions
About Helen
Helen Armstrong trained at Chelsea and Brighton art schools as a painter and printmaker, graduating with a National Diploma in Design in 1958. In the decades since, she's taught art and crafts in schools, worked as an illustrator and graphic designer, and trained as a counsellor. She’s combined art and private counselling, including running groups using art for self-knowledge.
Helen is one of Epiphany Art's long-standing members and served as Vice President of the Société Internationale des Artistes Chrétiens (SIAC) from 2000 to 2008, and as President of the Society of Sussex Painters from 2009 to 2012.
Now retired from counselling, Helen continues to paint and make prints in Hove, Sussex, where she lives with fellow Epiphany Art member John Armstrong.
In their own words
"What pleases me in my artwork is the way ‘the other’ can be found in everyday life. A road sign, jet vapour trails, sunlight falling on net curtains, a reflection in a train window — all can evoke an awareness of what lies beneath the surface. Artists deal with surface: we work with materials and how they look.
"As a counsellor, I look beneath the surface to see what was happening in the unconscious. In my artwork, I like to combine these different approaches, enjoying the pleasure of the surface effects while reflecting on the deeper meanings that are also visible."
Faith and the creative act
Helen's work grows from the conviction that the spiritual isn't separate from the material world — it inhabits it. Drawing on her parallel careers as artist and counsellor, she looks for what lies beneath the visible: the hidden anxieties, unspoken joys and quiet moments of recognition that run through daily life. The everyday — a reflection in glass, light through curtain fabric, the geometry of a road sign — becomes a threshold. Her printmaking and digital work explore that threshold with the same attentiveness she brought to the counselling room.
Selected works
