“If you can appreciate your paradise before you destroy it, then maybe you have a chance of saving it for yourself and future generations.” So says Bay Area painter Chester Arnold, whose works explore the natural world’s entanglement with humanity through dreamlike depictions of catastrophe and isolation. Arnold, even as he explores depressing topics like landfills, strip mining, and floods, often does so with humor and a strongly surrealist imagination, typically depicting scenes that never existed. Mysteriously inhabited islands shaped like croissants, bridges to nowhere, rowboats tossed by stormy seas, all feature in his moody, dramatic paintings. We’ll talk to him about how he finds a balance in his work between despair about man’s impact on the environment, and his still intact sense of optimism that it’s not too late to alter our destructive course.

All art talks are virtual, and will be taking place via Zoom.

Art Talks are FREE to the public, but registration is required.