Artist’s Statement:

Living titans, Picasso, Chagall, Magritte, and Giacometti, who were still producing masterworks, provided inspiration for any child born in the mid-twentieth century with ambitions to be an artist. These icons loomed as recognizably in their persons as their creations. Giacometti’s attenuated figurative work and painted excavations of models, posed in his studio, were accessible and sophisticated at once. His connection to the dignity of the ancients and the visceral present served as a model for directing my own attractions, and his legendary work ethic was something I readily embraced.

In order to give shape to scenes and characters developed in Bart Schneider’s Giacometti’s Last Ride, I needed to research the rugged spaces of Giacometti’s atelier, as well as the complexities of his visage. Fortunately, a bounty of photographic documentation made by masters of the medium, helped shape a tone that evolved as I worked through the written chapters.

This experience has rejuvenated skills, more specifically focused than I normally use in my studio, involving practice, as my ideas and attitudes toward illustration gave way to joyful improvisations. I found that a pack of non-filtered 1960s Gauloises felt as redolent of the

time as a character. It didn’t hurt that both the subject and his Parisian milieu were already favorite visual territories. The realities summoned by the pulsing physicality of Schneider’s writing encouraged a buoyant flow of drawings and watercolors.

May I suggest a Campari while reading?

Chester Arnold, June 2025

Writer’s statement

In my deep dive into Alberto Giacometti’s life and work, I came to realize that the colossal obsession that drove him to toil unrelenting hours in his toxic cave of an atelier, was a quest for authenticity rather than perfection. Giacometti wanted what he made to be real and he had an acute sense of anything false that crept in. A trio of pears seen from four meters needed to be rendered the size they appeared from that distance, not the size he knew them to be if held in his hand, for then he’d be painting a conception rather than a reality.

Although achieved with a saner approach, Chester Arnold’s art is marked by a similar pursuit of authenticity, alive in his paintings and drawings, with their robust humanity and magnificent craft. I am delighted that, with Chester’s work, we have created a collaborative vision of Alberto Giacometti and his milieu.

Bart Schneider, June 2025