#2 Correction (Mistakes Have Been Made), 1987
Oil on linen, 46 x 54 in.
Sawn Asunder, 1988
Charcoal on Paper, 42" x 46"
Chester Arnold was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1952. He received his B.A. from the College of Marin, Kentfield, California, and went on to earn his M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California, 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.
Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.