Charles Arnoldi, also known as Chuck Arnoldi and as Charles Arthur Arnoldi is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born April 10, 1946 in Dayton, Ohio.
While visiting a girlfriend’s grandmother in New York, he took the opportunity to view works by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Observing their smudges, smears, and imperfections, he sensed that he too was capable of such work, and decided to attend art school. Arnoldi attended junior college in Ventura, California, where a professor convinced him to apply to the Art Center in Los Angeles. He was accepted with a scholarship, and enrolled in commercial illustration classes. It was the late 1960s, and Arnoldi recalls a stifling classroom environment where male students were required to wear ties. After only two weeks, he left and transferred to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1968, where he remained for eight months before deciding to abandon his formal education and complete his training through his art practice. Arnoldi began using actual tree branches as a compositional element in his works, combined with painting to create stick constructions. These works did not endeavor to create illusions but rather inhabited physical space.
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