January 6 - February 26, 2022

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Bay Area painter Chester Arnold’s exhibition, Survivors, featuring a new series of exquisitely detailed oceanic scenes that delve into themes surrounding human presence in the natural world.

 Arnold’s oil paintings are inspired by memory and imagination and he creates dreamlike images that combine realism and fantasy with meticulous specificity. The large and small scale recent works focus on maritime imagery that convey precarity and fortitude. Arnold distills entire worlds into each oil painting through depictions of expansive open seas, towering island sanctuaries populated with miniature houses, fishing boats caught in tumultuous whirlpools, or life raft remnants washed ashore. 

 While the works communicate a narrative ambiguity that invites the viewer’s perceptions, the artist intends the exhibition title connotes hopefulness over despair through metaphorical scenes of resilience.

 Chester Arnold is a California Bay Area painter whose visual narratives combine the cataclysmic and the sublime. Born in 1952, Chester Arnold received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1987. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Salt Lake Art Center (Salt Lake City, UT), San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose, CA), the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (Novato, CA), and the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV) as well as in group exhibitions at the National Museum (Gdansk, Poland), the Associacao Alumni (São Paulo, Brazil), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York, NY) among others. In 2018 he was given the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award.