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Ann Arnold

Ann Arnold was born in San Francisco in 1952 and has spent all but two years of her life in the Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she studied etching, drawing and the history of art. She gave up etching for want of equipment when she left the university and began to paint still life, first in gouache on paper and then in oil on walnut panels.

Her technique in oil is a natural development from her work in gouache. Although partly the result of trial and error, it has come to approximate the style used in earlier centuries (and not much taught today), in which oils were viewed as something of a transparent medium to be worked up in layers from below, rather than left as the single layer of underpaint that is now a socially acceptable form of artistic undress.

The subject matter for her still life paintings is drawn from her own possessions, a small collection of eighteenth century pottery and porcelain, and an accumulation of baskets. Most of her earlier paintings of fruits and vegetables had to be drawn from models found in her own or neighboring gardens, but now the farmers' markets supply an abundance of picturesque specimens. A few years ago she planted an orchard of old fruit varieties in a neighboring churchyard in hopes of an even more various harvest.

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