Location: Sonoma, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing
Website: chesterarnoldartist.com
Chester Arnold was born in 1952 in the United States and spent a major portion of his childhood in post-war Germany, where exposure to the great museums of Munich and Vienna shaped his belief in the power of painting to communicate beyond words. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and has lived and worked in Sonoma, California for many years. He taught as a senior fine arts faculty member at the College of Marin for twenty years, retiring in 2018, and has also taught at San Francisco State University and Sonoma State University. He has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco since 2003. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and the San José Museum of Art. His awards include a 2005 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018). He has published two monographs with Kelly’s Cove Press: Evidence: Painting by Chester Arnold 1989–2017 (2017) and The Daily Feast (2022), a collaboration with poet Bart Schneider.
Arnold works in oil on canvas and panel, producing psychologically rich landscapes and narrative paintings that celebrate and interrogate humanity’s presence in the natural world. His compositions often adopt skewed aerial perspectives that place the viewer above unfolding scenes of environmental degradation, human accumulation, and geological extremes. Crashing waves, cavernous ravines, 400-year-old oak trees, and vast deposits of human detritus are recurring subjects — painted with technical virtuosity and a persistent undercurrent of moral unease. Growing up among the ruins and reconstruction of post-war Germany gave Arnold a deep sense of social responsibility that has shaped a practice spanning more than fifty years.
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