Chester Arnold’s “Small Time Operation”/Courtesy: Chester Arnold
In new work at Catharine Clark’s, Sonoma painter Chester Arnold unfurls further his metaphors for the artistic life: prospecting, mining and survivalism.
“60 Years in the Forest” (2012) suggests the self-portrait of a temperament, though not even Arnold’s friends will recognize him in the glum figure nursing a campfire – and perhaps some grudges – at the edge of a woodland clearing.
“A Game of Bones” (2012) insinuates a more macabre self-reference with its vision of a miner and his worldly goods reduced to skeletal remains and a dispersed, desert floor still-life: pistol, liquor bottles, pickax, hat, dynamite and whatnot.
“A game of bones” is also a crapshoot, of course, like the making of a painting. Allusions to James Ensor’s visionary posthumous self-portraits and to Stéphane Mallarmé, who conceived of a poem as a roll of the dice, clatter out of Arnold’s picture.
The specter of Gustave Courbet’s still controversial “Origin of the World” (1866) comically haunts some of Arnold’s mineshaft pictures. But the largest of them, “Small Time Operation” (2012), confronts us with the abyss – the pit mine as mouth of hell and symbol of greed and ambition digging their own grave. To read more from the San Francisco Chronicle’s article, click here.