Chester Arnold | The Song of the Earth

June 1 - July 15, 2017

Chester Arnold is a California Bay Area painter whose visual narratives combine the cataclysmic and the sublime. Arnold’s latest series of oil paintings explore the natural world’s entanglement with humanity through dreamlike depictions of catastrophe and isolation.

Arnold's dark visual humor is balanced by the indefatigable sense of optimism seen in his affectionate renderings of plant life. Weeds, dandelions and blades of bright green grass energetically sprout through cracks in asphalt, suggesting a persistence of growth and survival. Throughout the artist's vast oeuvre of psychologically charged landscapes, themes of evolution and renewal endure in Arnold's imagined worlds.

Born in 1952, Chester Arnold received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1987. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Salt Lake Art Center (Salt Lake City, UT), San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose, CA) and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (Novato, CA), as well as in group exhibitions at the National Museum in Gdansk, Poland, and the Associacao Alumni, São Paulo, Brazil, among others.