Chester Arnold: A Brief Summary of My So-Called Life South Gallery @ Catharine Clark Gallery

Chester Arnold’s exhibition, A Brief Summary of My So-Called Life, features new and recent paintings that survey many of the key themes of the artist’s 50+ year career. As with Farrow, Arnold’s work foregrounds memento mori, though with a sense of humor. The titular painting of the exhibition, for example, features a skull situated within the artist’s Sonoma studio, seated atop a pile of multicolored leaves that appear elsewhere in Arnold’s paintings. Strewn around the skull are paintbrushes, a palette, an eraser, and drawing instruments, an accumulation of Arnold’s creative effects. Next to the skull sits Arnold’s signature red ledger, in which he records every single painting that he has created. The ledger is closed but sits next to an open sketchbook, signaling that Arnold’s creative process is far from finished but always in ideation.

Arnold writes: “After painting for more than half a century—despite all evolutions in an art world in continual flux—I find the classical virtues that attracted me so long ago to the practice of painting have given me ever deeper means of embracing life. A relentless metaphorical drive has always guided what appears in my studio—and as time has presented its pageants of love, life, and death, these primal elements have never been more vivid, more palpable than in the imagery of forests, leaves, and our presence in nature. These considerations harken to those of 19th-century transcendental thinking. It is in the articulation of marks on a canvas that I am driven to both describe and discover rhythms in this dialogue with living. The phenomena of life have summoned the adventures mapped here.”

 On the back of one canvas are written lines that reflect the themes and meanings in the works on view:

In stillness dusk was doubled In reflection

It was the world again

Reminding us to see

The up and down of everything

Of day and night's brief moment

Of embrace.

It is the chiaroscuro inherent in living that drives

this summary of my so-called life.