Exhibition Catalog

In Winter/Spring 2022, the Fresno Art Museum will present a retrospective exhibition of the work of Northern California painter Chester Arnold entitled Reports to the Contrary: A Persistent Vision - Paintings 1971-2021 by Chester Arnold. The exhibited masterworks will span the years 1971 through 2021 and will come from the artist's personal collection, select private collectors, the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and Bay Area museums.

Chester Arnold was born in Santa Monica, California in 1952. From the age of five, he lived and went to school in Munich, Germany where his father, a linguist and field agent, worked for a United States Intelligence Unit. From 1957 to 1969, Arnold lived in a post-war atmosphere that profoundly affected his ideas about humankind and the world-forging sense of social responsibility that has seldom escaped expression in his paintings. His education was replete with studies in the humanities, but it was exposure to the great museums of Munich and Vienna that shaped a belief in the power of painting to communicate beyond words--a power that he has pursued ever since.

Upon graduation from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988, Arnold began a fruitful teaching career (paralleling his studio practice) in classes taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, and for the first two decades of this century as a senior fine arts faculty member at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California.

Arnold has shown his work extensively from coast to coast, and his paintings can be found in many public collections, notably at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, California, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, and the Seven Bridges Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Since 2003, Chester Arnold has been represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco where his work is seen regularly in both solo and group shows.