NATALIE ARNOLDI
Natalie Arnoldi (b. 1990) Natalie Arnoldi’s art emerges from a deep, lifelong connection to the ocean, shaped by her childhood in Malibu. While conducting a full-time career as an artist, Arnoldi attended Stanford University where she received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees before earning a PhD in Marine Ecology.
While Arnoldi’s subjects aren’t limited to the sea, they all bear the mark of a highly developed aesthetic style: one that is defined by a unified color palette of mostly blues and grays. Forms loom in murky half-lights, hanging on the edges of perception, where ambiguity becomes an invitation for the viewer to imagine beyond the edges of the canvas. Whether a shark suspended in ocean depths, a jellyfish caught in ethereal light, a fog-covered cityscape, or an abandoned gas station, Arnoldi’s works offer just enough visual information to ignite a broad spectrum of emotional and intellectual engagement.
As an artist, Arnoldi paints prolifically. Her compositions – informed by research – are ambitious. The paintings are often quite large in scale to evoke the vastness, power, and mystery of nature. The content of Arnoldi’s paintings is informed by overarching environmental narratives and concerns. Arnoldi’s aim is not only to capture beauty, but to educate, instill awe, and shift our relationship to nature, urging the viewer to contemplate the unseen and the unknown.
The artist notes, “Few images are as evocative and inspire such a broad spectrum of emotions than standing at the shore and looking out to sea. This vantage also represents the quintessential challenge to marine conservation: it is nearly impossible to diagnose the health of the ocean just by standing at the shore, and it is this inaccessibility which makes it so difficult to study.”
Arnoldi’s work has been widely recognized, with solo museum exhibitions at the Bakersfield Museum and the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History in California. She has participated in over fifty group exhibitions to date. She currently resides in Central California, where she continues her artistic and ecological explorations.
EXHIBITIONS
AllTogetherNow
DEEP WATER
MEDIA
INCONVERSATION: Natalie Arnoldi
