Catharine Clark Gallery opens its Summer 2026 program with three exhibitions: It’s Not Dark Yet, a solo exhibition of new and recent sculptures by Al Farrow (North Gallery); A Brief Summary of My So-Called Life, an exhibition of new paintings by Chester Arnold (South Gallery); and F, a solo Media Room presentation by Rob Carter. The exhibitions on view are the third in a series organized under the theme Roots & Shoots on the occasion of the gallery’s 35th anniversary. The anniversary year celebrates artists who have sustained long relationships with the gallery alongside newer voices entering the program.
The year began with a survey exhibition spanning five decades of work by Masami Teraoka, who has been represented by the gallery since 1997, along with a Media Room video by Ken Goldberg (also represented since 1997) created in collaboration with Tiffany Shlain. Following this, the gallery presented Run Fast, Bite Hard, a group exhibition curated by gallery partner and director Anton Stuebner. This rotation of exhibitions features two of the gallery’s earliest artists, Al Farrow and Chester Arnold, whose careers have been represented by the gallery since 1991 and 2003, respectively. The exhibition is also a tribute to the long friendship between Farrow and Arnold, who met at the College of Marin nearly 50 years ago.
Chester Arnold’s exhibition, A Brief Summary of My So-Called Life, features new and recent paintings that survey many of the key themes of the artist’s 50+ year career. As with Farrow, Arnold’s work foregrounds memento mori, though with a sense of humor. The titular painting of the exhibition, for example, features a skull situated within the artist’s Sonoma studio, seated atop a pile of multicolored leaves that appear elsewhere in Arnold’s paintings. Strewn around the skull are paintbrushes, a palette, an eraser, and drawing instruments, an accumulation of Arnold’s creative effects. Next to the skull sits Arnold’s signature red ledger, in which he records every single painting that he has created. The ledger is closed but sits next to an open sketchbook, signaling that Arnold’s creative process is far from finished but always in ideation.
Arnold writes: “After painting for more than half a century—despite all evolutions in an art world in continual flux—I find the classical virtues that attracted me so long ago to the practice of painting have given me ever deeper means of embracing life. A relentless metaphorical drive has always guided what appears in my studio—and as time has presented its pageants of love, life, and death, these primal elements have never been more vivid, more palpable than in the imagery of forests, leaves, and our presence in nature. These considerations harken to those of 19th-century transcendental thinking. It is in the articulation of marks on a canvas that I am driven to both describe and discover rhythms in this dialogue with living. The phenomena of life have summoned the adventures mapped here.”
On the back of one canvas are written lines that reflect the themes and meanings in the works on view:
In stillness dusk was doubled In reflection
It was the world again
Reminding us to see
The up and down of everything
Of day and night's brief moment
Of embrace.
It is the chiaroscuro inherent in living that drives
this summary of my so-called life.
