Chester Arnold | Survivors | Viewing Room
Chester Arnold, Last Resort, 2020, oil on linen, 56 x 70"
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Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Bay Area painter Chester Arnold’s exhibition, Survivors, featuring a new series of exquisitely detailed oceanic scenes that delve into themes surrounding human presence in the natural world.
Chester Arnold, Dire Straits, 2019, oil on linen, 60 x 72"
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Chester Arnold, Archipelago lV: The Island of Many Caves, 2019, oil on linen panel, 8 x 10"
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Arnold’s oil paintings are inspired by memory and imagination and he creates dreamlike images that combine realism and fantasy with meticulous specificity. The large and small scale recent works focus on maritime imagery that convey precarity and fortitude. Arnold distills entire worlds into each oil painting through depictions of expansive open seas, towering island sanctuaries populated with miniature houses, fishing boats caught in tumultuous whirlpools, or life raft remnants washed ashore.
We seldom meet someone who utters feelings and inklings we recognize as our own and have no language for, but when this happens we feel relieved of an unchosen solitariness. This is the sort of experience many people have when they become aquainted with Chester Arnold's painting.
– KENNETH BAKER, ART CRITIC, INTRODUCTION TO CHESTER ARNOLD: PAINTINGS 1988-1994, 1994
Chester Arnold, How Wiley Saved the World, 2021, oil on linen panel, 6 x 8"
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Chester Arnold, Survivors lll, 2021, oil on linen panel, 14 x 18"
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While the works communicate a narrative ambiguity that invites the viewer’s perceptions, the artist intends the exhibition title to connote hopefulness over despair and metaphorical scenes of resilience.
Concerned about the increasing impact of human interventions in landscapes on a densely populated and deeply consumer-driven planet, Arnold's work questions the nature of human beings' relationship to the world, offering cautionary implications that all of us share complicity in unbridled cycles of production and consumption on an industrial scale.
– COLIN M. ROBERTSON, CURATOR OF EDUCATION, SOME UNCOMMON AND GRIEVOUS CALAMITY: CHESTER ARNOLD AND THE CONTEMPORARY SUBLIME, 2010
Chester Arnold, Joe's Salvage, 2021, oil on linen panel, 14 x 18"
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ARTIST NOTES: EXPANDING ON THE PAINTED IMAGE
ABOVE: Handwritten poetry on the backs of Arnold’s paintings.
The subject of writings on the backs of my canvas goes back several decades, on and off, as the impulse to expand on the painted image presented itself. If I had not been a painter, I would have attempted poetry. If not a poet, then an improvisational pianist. Alas, painting was the only of these three that grabbed me to the core, and the others have followed in their own fashion.
My youth was inhabited by strong attractions: music, poetry and visual art.
These have remained the avenues of my connection to my peers and the world.
Although the most powerful of these forces is generated visually, spontaneously,
once an image is made, my own reflection of the contents leads me to write
on the backs of canvases- an obvious, beautiful blank linen expanse, and the
writing that appears is most often in the immediate aftermath of the painting’s finish.
I have sometimes called this writing the “longest titles ever composed” for a painting. There have been two self-published editions of these writings, “Prospector” from 2008,
and “The Crooked Timber” from 2010.
– CHESTER ARNOLD, 2021
Chester Arnold, Shore Report, 2021, oil on linen panel, 16 x 20"
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Learn more about the making of Survivors in this exclusive interview with Chester Arnold:
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chester Arnold is a California Bay Area painter whose visual narratives combine the cataclysmic and the sublime. 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), the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (Novato, CA), and the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV) as well as in group exhibitions at the National Museum (Gdansk, Poland), the Associacao Alumni (São Paulo, Brazil), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York, NY) among others. In 2018 he was given the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award.
