Chester Arnold

June 9 – September 9, 2012

Public Opening Reception Friday, June 9, 5-7pm.
Museum Members are Free. Non-members $15.
Enjoy reception with Sonoma County wines and craft cheeses.
Live music.

An internationally known artist, Chester Arnold lives and works in Sonoma, California.  His large-scale oil paintings offer up rich and forthright depictions of the natural landscape, and human impacts on that landscape.  Arnold is acutely tuned in to the traditions of nineteenth-century European painting, but his subject matter also addresses contemporary concerns such as industrial consumption, environmental degradation, and waste.  The result is paintings that are at once beautiful, melancholy, and pointed critique.  The exhibit Chester Arnold: Trees presents an ongoing focus of Arnold’s work:  trees, forest landscapes, and the interactions between humanity and these wild spaces, ranging from human activities such as logging, to natural decay, to the insistent power of the woods to reclaim their space.  In curating Trees, the Sonoma County Museum presents Arnold’s painterly meditations as both compliment to and commentary on Sonoma County’s own natural landscape of wooded hills, redwoods and oaks. 

Arnold’s work is in the collections of many institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and the San Jose Museum of Art.  He has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, since 2003.