Chester Arnold
born Santa Monica, California, 1952
Chester Arnold is a San Francisco Bay Area oil painter whose works explore contemporary landscapes. Each of his naturalistic paintings is a scene in the narrative, a juxtaposition of nature and the human presence. Arnold embraces the craft of painting, but eschews traditional, romantic portrayals of the natural environment. He chooses instead to depict the landscape as we encounter it, warts and all. He leads us on an odyssey through entropic litterscapes and canyons carved by excavators and probed by prospectors. He guides us along rivers of asphalt and over mountains of tires, showing us nature’s struggle in the midst of growing human consumption and waste. And he provides glimpses of nature’s resilience, as frogs emerge from the cracked pavement and trees rise above itinerant scatters of trash. Arnold supplies us with a birds-eye view of these scenes, inviting us to transcend the tainted landscape and to restore its natural state.
[accessed February 2020]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
- Santa Monica
born Portland, Maine, 1832; died New York, New York, 1920
born Aledo, Illinois, 1905; died Clearwater, Florida, 1983
born Roswell, New Mexico, 1904; died Roswell, New Mexico, 1984
born Paris, France, 1796; died Paris, France, 1875
born Sowan, Korea, 1929; died Boise, Idaho, 2009
born Lansing, Michigan, 1941; died Portland, Oregon, 2019
