Born in Dayton, Ohio, Charles Arnoldi is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. After moving to California at 18, Arnoldi was urged to enroll in art school by employers who recognized his creative talent. He briefly attended Ventura College as well as the Art Center in Los Angeles, where he took issue with the rigidity of educational institutions. He dropped out of the Art Center and instead decided to hone his skills through his own practice. Many of his early pieces incorporate different forms of wood, including branches and sticks. His style evolved throughout the 1980s to include vibrant paintings on canvas as well as more colorful manifestations of his wood pieces. The result was works of art that are undeniably natural yet could never occur in nature.
Shapes, color and proportions are motifs Arnoldi has been addressing during his decades-long career, drawing from architectural elements or forms seen in nature for inspiration. Arnoldi’s geometric abstractions are colorful balances of rigid grids containing gestural arcs, some disrupted by non-uniform shapes of the canvas. He paints on individual panels and later assembles them, at times leaving them un-aligned and making way for gaps and irregular edges. The nature of the hard-edged geometric compositions becomes more apparent with the play between the foreground and background and their spatial relationshps. Arnoldi has had a distinguished career and his work is extensively collected in private, corporate and public collections.