Born 1972, Los Angeles, Ca.

Resides and works Calabasas, Ca.

Education:

Orange County High School of the Arts 1990

 Gregory Arnold (b. 1972, Los Angeles)  is a Japanese-American multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Calabasas, Ca. He studied art at OCHSA and afterwards played in notorious L.A. bands like Thelonious Monster, Bicycle Thief, and Residual Echoes. After exhibiting works in group shows at punk spaces like Echo Curio, The Smell, and other small galleries in china town and Echo park, Greg took a sabbatical as the creative director for his own brand Dark Horse before returning to his first passion of oil painting on large canvas. 

Gregory Arnold’s paintings emerge from a sustained engagement with landscape as a site of memory, erosion, and recurrence. Working on a large scale, he constructs surfaces through successive layers of thin washes and dense accumulations, allowing the image to oscillate between formation and dissolution. Fields, horizons, and vegetal forms appear and recede within atmospheres of muted greens, ochres, and grays, punctuated by moments of heightened chroma. The paintings resist fixed vantage points, instead presenting environments that feel both observed and internally generated, where space is built as much through time as through depiction.

A defining element of the work is its material instability. Drips, veils, and scumbled passages register the physical process of painting as an ongoing negotiation between control and surrender. In many of the works, clustered forms—suggestive of flowers, figures, or growth—press upward against darker, more compressed upper fields, creating a tension between emergence and suppression. The surfaces carry a sense of weathering, as if the image has been exposed, reworked, and partially obscured over time. This produces a visual language that is neither purely abstract nor representational, but suspended between the two.

Arnold’s paintings ultimately engage with cycles of persistence and disappearance. The repeated gestures, layered marks, and shifting densities evoke processes of decay, renewal, and accumulation found in the natural world, while also reflecting the temporal nature of painting itself. The result is work that invites prolonged looking, where meaning is not fixed but gradually revealed through the interplay of material, atmosphere, and memory.

Exhibitions:

Solo show MOOI 1700 w sunset blvd, June 2010

Group show Echo Curio, Echo Park, September 2009

Group Show Two Headed Horse, LA,July 2009

Group Show Pehrspace, LA, August, 2008

Group Show The Smell, LA, Summer 2008