Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Chester Arnold, Faucet, 1987
oil on linen
46 x 54 in.

Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1952, Chester Arnold studied at the College of Marin, Kentfield, California, from 1970 to 1974 and wen ton to earn his M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987. Arnold has had regular solo exhibitions at galleries in California since 1979. He has taught classes in drawing and painting at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Arnold's representational paintings explore different themes in various series. His work is filled with references to other art, including figures or settings from historical paintings. In the late 1980s Arnold did a series of tool "portraits," structured similarly to Renaissance portraits, with the sitter in the foreground and a distant landscape in the background. Many of these paintings showed building frameworks, construction activities, or fires, suggesting continual cycles of creation and destruction.