The Glen Wild Studio

"The garden of earthly delights" from "Believe Me!", a sketchbook, 1993

I'm Rich Arnold, the founder of Glen Wild Studio, not your average conformist artist

Education

Yale University, B.A., Summa cum laude, in Art History, 1970

Queens College, City University of New York, 1970-1973, Graduate Study in Art and Art History

Pratt Institute, M.L.S., Summa cum laude, 1979

Elected lifelong member of Phi Beta Kappa, 1969

One and Two-Person Exhibitions

Gallery 484, New York, NY. Rich Arnold: Terracotta Sculptures. October, 1982

Ellenville Library and Museum, Ellenville, NY. A New York City Sketchbook by Richard Arnold. December, 1984

The Artfull Eye, Lambertville, N.J. Richard Arnold: Baroque Visions. May-June, 1987

Cragsmoor Federated Church, Cragsmoor, NY. Rich Arnold: New Sculpture; John Hart: New Paintings. August, 1987

Watermark/Cargo Gallery, Kingston, NY. Rich Arnold: Terracotta Sketches; Leslie Roitman: Monoprints. September, 1991

Donskoj & Company, Kingston, NY. Rich Arnold: Sculptures. June, 1992

Benedictine Hospital Art Gallery, Kingston, NY. Drawn from Life: Observations of Family and Friends, 1979-1994: Portrait Drawings by Rick Arnold. October, 1994

Marcuse Gallery, Kingston, NY. Rich Arnold's Terracotta Animals from the Hudson Valley and Elsewhere. April-May, 1995

Benedictine Hospital Art Gallery, Kingston, NY. "Double-pages and Doppelganger of Richard Arnold". Introduction by Tram Combs. February, 1996

Ellenville Library and Museum, Ellenville, NY. Richard Arnold: Recent Book Drawings. February, 2000

Group Exhibitions

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Staff Art Show. October, 1982

Cragsmoor Free Library, Cragsmoor, NY. Artists of the Shawangunk Region. Curated by Nancy Kearing. July, 1985

Kingston Library, Kingston, NY. Drawings by Kingston Artists. September, 1990

Cooperstown Art Association, Cooperstown, NY. The 58th Annual National Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture and Fine Prints. Ivan Karp, Juror. June-July-August, 1993

Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, N.Y. Color: An Exhibition. June, 1993

Donskoj & Company, Kingston, NY. Food For Thought. December, 1993

Gallery at Park West, Kingston, NY. New Art from Kingston. Curated by Tram Combs. January, 1994

Leslie/Lohman Art Gallery, New York, NY. Universal Diversity 2: Our Vision, Our Selves. July, 1994

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY. First Small Works Invitational. July, 1994

Leslie-Lohman Art Gallery, NY. ArtGroup Addresses AIDS. January, 1995

Warren Street Gallery, Hudson, NY. ArtGroup: First Outing. May-June, 1995

Warren Street Gallery, Hudson, NY. Bestiary. June, 1995

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY. Second Annual Small Works Invitational Part 1: Works on Paper. June-July, 1995

Pump House Gallery, Hartford, Conn. Art Without Borders: Exhibition 1996. June, 1996

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY. 3rd Annual Small Works Invitational: Works on Paper. July, 1996

Fowler Gallery, Provincetown, Mass. The Male Image. June-September, 1997

Leslie-Lohman Art Gallery, New York, NY. Leslie-Lohman Selects. July, 1999

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY. Small Works Invitational: Paintings 2000. June-July, 2000

Kingston City Hall, Kingston, NY. Kingston Library Live [Benefit] Auction, Sunday, November 19, 2000.

Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY. Art Auction 2001 Sunday, March 11, 2001, Casperkill Country Club... to benefit the Youth Art Programs of Barrett Art Center/Dutchess County Art Association.

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, N.Y. Annual Small Works Invitational Paintings 2001. June-July, 2001

Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery, Ethel Wattis Kimball Visual Arts Center, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah. A Spellbound Vision: Viewing Asmat Art Through the Eyes of the Western Contemporary Artist. September, 2002

Kingston City Hall, Kingston, NY. Friends of the Kingston Library 2002 [Benefit] Art Auction. November, 2002

Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge, NY. Food: A Regional Juried Exhibition. Mar. 13 – Apr. 17, 2009

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY. Small Works Invitational 2010: Works on Paper. August 3-21, 2010

Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, SUNYUlster, Stone Ridge, NY. Water: A Regional Show Juried by Portia Munson. Mar. 9 - Apr. 20, 2012

Arts Society of Kingston, NY. Regional Juried Exhibition. April 6-27, 2013

Catskill Art Society, Livingston Manor, NY. Summer Member's Show.  June-July, 2013

Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Gallery, Narrowsburg, NY. Art in Sixes:  a small works exhibition. Nov. 23 - Dec. 22, 2013

Catskill Art Society, Livingston Manor, NY. Winter Members Show. Nov. 23-Dec.31, 2013

Healing Arts Gallery - Ellenville Regional Hospital. Creative Convergence: Cragsmoor Artists, John Hart, Tom Bolger, Jeff Kraft, and Richard Arnold. March 3 - April 25, 2014

Alliance Gallery, DVAA, Narrowsburg, N.Y.  10th annual Art in Sixes: a small works exhibition. Nov. 15 - Dec.23, 2014

Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge, NY.  Peace & Justice: a regional juried show. Juried by Elisa Pritzker. March 13 - April 17, 2015.

Wired Gallery, High Falls, NY.  Cragsmoor Artists Today.  April 18 - May 24, 2015.

Catskill Art Society, Livingston Manor, NY. Summer Members Show.  July 4 - Aug. 2, 2015.

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY.  2015 Small Works Invitational.  July 7 - 25, 2015

Alliance Gallery, DVAA, Narrowsburg, N.Y. Art in Sixes: small works group show.  Nov.21 -Dec. 23, 2015

Catskill Art Society, Livingston Manor, NY. Winter Members Show. Nov.-Dec., 2015

Catskill Art Society, Livingston Manor, NY.  Summer Members Show. July, 2016.

Blue Mountain Gallery, New York, NY. Small Works Invitational: Works on paper. Aug. 2 - 20, 2016

Hurleyville Maker's Lab, Hurleyville, NY. Member Made: artwork  by members of the Maker's Lab. Dec., 2016

Alliance Gallery, DVAA, Narrowsburg, NY. Twelfth Annual Art in Sixes: A Small Works Exhibition.  Nov. 19 - Dec. 21, 2016

Catskill Art Society, Livingston Manor, NY. Winter Members Show. Dec. 2016.

Chris Davison Gallery@Regal Bag Studios in Newburgh, NY. THE NUDE: [figural works by Hudson Valley artists]. Feb. 25 - Mar. 11, 2017.

A Biography

Rich Arnold was born in Summit, New Jersey, the second son of Robert, a WWII veteran of the war in the Philippines, and Kathryn, a Brooklyn native whom Robert had met at a neighborhood Methodist church group. His childhood was spent in the suburbs of New Jersey and Connecticut, with an interlude of two grade school years with his family in India. He attended Ridge High School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and began to think of himself as an artist among his peers; for some meticulously rendered life studies of plants in pen and ink he won a National Merit Scholarship Award in Art in his senior year.

Still life with violin and poinsettia plant, January, 1966. Pen and ink on paper.

Then he studied art history and a little of whatever else he liked, including languages and studio art, at Yale, and received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970, winning a prize for his thesis on American art. His topic was "Representational Painting in New York City Today." In his Junior and Senior years he worked in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery where he learned to see under the mentorship of Alan Shestack and Anne-Marie Logan. This was a great opportunityto get to know intimately Yale's collection of masterworks on paper which he carefully studied as he hinged and matted them for storage or exhibition.

After Yale, Arnold moved to New York and studied art and art history at Queens College of City University. Among his teachers there were the notable contemporary art critic Max Kozloff, the figurative sculptors Mary Frank and William King, and the painter Robert de Niro, Sr., father of the Hollywood film actor. However, it was Louis Finkelstein from whom Arnold learned the most about construction and deconstruction of the work of art.

My desk, oil on canvas, painted April 1971, Ridgewood, NJ

During Arnold's twelve years in Manhattan another degree at Pratt in Library Science, and jobs at the New York Pubic Library's Art Division and Rare Book Division, The New-York Historical Society, and finally at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While at the museum, he was invited by Museum Educator Hazel Rodriguez to lecture about his own art for the Department of Community Education.

Sketch done from life after the Met's own "Fortune Teller", by Georges de La Tour

His artwork also won the praise of Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Curator of European Sculpture and Painting, who in turn introduced him to Lincoln Kirstein. Kirstein liked Arnold's terracotta figurines in the manner of Clodion, and acquired three  in exchange for a small Nadelman bronze from his own collection. After seeing some drawings, Kirstein later asked Arnold to make some sketches of the New York City Ballet's lead dancer Joe Duell. Arnold went backstage of the NY State Theater to meet with Duell for a series of drawing sessions which resulted in a portrait head in terracotta, still in the artist's collection. A member of a small network of curators, dealers, patrons, and artists, as well as librarians and writers, Arnold lived throughout the seventies in Washington Heights in a sixth floor apartment/studio looking down the West Side of Manhattan.

Mom visiting my studio, summer 1980, oil on canvas

Arnold's teacher Gabriel Laderman once remarked that he'd painted the same view from the same apartment building a few years earlier. Resident at the time in that apartment building were some seniors who had been refugees from Nazi Germany and two had managed to get out of Europe with some of their family treasures of German Expressionist and Impressionist canvases.  Mrs. Schiff in Apartment 6 B had a collection of Paula Modersohn Becker and Mrs. Feitler on the fifth floor had a Max Slevogt.  So there were treasures among the apartments in Washington Heights in those days, little did one know.

Arnold shared this life with a partner, Ronald Fritz, who was a remarkably talented young sculpture dealer with the firm of Michael Hall Fine Arts, Ltd. During that time, Fritz's business and Arnold's hobby was auction-hopping and collecting old masters. Arnold served for a time as art consultant to Michael Loman, the producer of Sesame Street, and put together Loman's collection of 17th-18th century Italian master drawings. Meanwhile, Arnold discovered--or rediscovered--the joy of modeling with clay, the start of his real career, in 1981.

Ron Fritz in the gallery at five o'clock

Michael Hall Fine Arts, Ltd. 167 E. 80th St., where Ron worked, as it was in 1982. Note Gemito bronze in foreground.

Lexington Ave. Subway, November 1983

While spending the summers of the early eighties at his country house, Arnold worked on a major commission for the Westchester residence of Shelby White and Leon Levy, the well known family of art collectors and donors. This commission, a giant terracotta chess set, was finally completed and installed in its setting in September, 1985. Another friend, the art editor and writer Marvin Schwartz, who knew Arnold from the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum, asked Arnold to illustrate his column "The Last Word" for Antiques World, an assignment Arnold was delighted to accept. The result was a six-month series of wash drawings of American decorative art objects based mostly on observations from the Met's own American Wing collections.

Arnold became a part of the historic artist colony of Cragsmoor, New York, a mountaintop hamlet where he had his home and studio from 1980 to 1988. In this region many nationally and internationally known artists have resided since the late nineteenth century. In fact, Arnold's house "Winahdin" was the eccentric turn-of-the-century creation of the American amateur architect Frederick Dellenbaugh, a founder of Cragsmoor, and originally belonged to the American Impressionist painter Charles Courtney Curran.

Winahdin, built for Charles Courtney Curran

Arnold was to discover an original Curran drawing in the attic--a still life in charcoal from Curran’s student days, which Arnold later donated to the Cragsmoor Free Library. Arnold was included with four of his own terracotta sculptures in an exhibition  produced by the Cragsmoor Free Library in 1985 entitled "Artists of the Shawangunk Region".  It was a sampling of contemporary  artists working/summering in Cragsmoor.  Many of these, as in Curran's day, were New York City artists--names from the New York art scene like Milton Resnick, Pat Passlof, Lois Lane, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Robert Mangold. The exhibition was guest curated by Nancy Kearing.

Arnold relocated to Kingston, New York in 1989, and ran a studio for working and teaching at the nearby West Park Art Center, on the bank of the Black Creek, only a stone's throw from John Burroughs' romantic cabin Slab Sides.

The Hudson from a vantage in Port Ewen, NY, August, 1993, from a notebook

There were periodic shows in and outside the region, notably at the Blue Mountain Gallery and the Leslie-Lohman Foundation Gallery in New York City (now the Leslie- Lohman Museum), where he found an appreciative audience of sophisticated urban professionals. The Leslie-Lohman Foundation singled him out along with a few others for a group exhibition--"Leslie-Lohman Selects"--in 1999. Some years later, the Leslie-Lohman Museum acquired an artist's book and a bronze relief plaque from Arnold for their permanent collection.

Arnold in the year two thousand with scientific instrument, Rock Hill, NY

Arnold has been living since 1996 in the Catskills of Sullivan County, New York, where he continues his art activities at the Glen Wild Studios.

At end of day, April 10, 2006, Stonewall Acres in Rock Hill, New York

Arnold has welcomed visitors  from Europe and Asia as well as America; he teaches at the Glen Wild Studio and at nearby Sullivan County Community College; gives demonstrations of his favorite working methods; lectures on favorite topics, including ceramics from New Guinea; makes new friends all the time, and is always willing to share his art and ideas with those who happen to have discovered him on the World Wide Web, or elsewhere.

My back door garden, Stonewall Acres, Rock Hill, NY

Christmas 08 one flies, one dies

My last vacation in P'town, in 2012.