Location: Sonoma, CA
Medium: Oil painting
Website: cclarkgallery.com/artists/bios/chester-arnold
Chester Arnold (b. 1952, Santa Monica, California) is a painter based in Sonoma, California. He spent much of his childhood in post-war Germany, an experience that informs his lifelong preoccupation with human accumulation, ruin, and the cycles of creation and destruction. He returned to the United States and studied art at the College of Marin, Kentfield, California, and went on to earn his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1988). Arnold has taught painting and drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, and Sonoma State University, and was a senior fine arts faculty member at the College of Marin for approximately twenty years (1988–2018), when he retired from teaching. His work is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.
Arnold paints large-scale representational canvases that take the natural world as their starting point and subvert it with images of human detritus, fire, accumulation, and ruin. His compositions place the viewer at an elevated vantage point above an unfolding narrative below, creating a sense of witness that is simultaneously aesthetic and moral. His work draws on the history of landscape painting — Northern European and 19th-century American in particular — while treating the tradition as something to be reckoned with rather than revived.
Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (acquired Beyond This, 2019); Crocker Art Museum; Nevada Museum of Art; di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art; Tacoma Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art. His work is also featured by Art Works for Change
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