ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings explore the relationship between perception, emotion, and understanding. I am drawn to subjects that carry complex and often contradictory associations: beauty and danger, serenity and menace, familiarity and uncertainty. Through light, atmosphere, and obscured perspectives, I create images that invite an immediate emotional response while allowing space for that response to evolve.
Across seemingly disparate bodies of work I return to questions of human vulnerability and our relationship with the natural and human-made world. An image that initially appears beautiful may become unsettling with greater understanding; something we instinctively fear may reveal unexpected beauty or vulnerability. I am interested in how knowledge, memory, and personal experience shape what we see, and how the same image can hold multiple, even conflicting, meanings.
As a marine ecologist, I study how predators interact with one another and their environments. As an artist, I am interested in how we interact with and perceive the world around us. Both practices reflect a curiosity about relationships, and about how our understanding influences what we value.
The Water Column, PRAx, Oregon State University, 2026. Photograph by Natalia Bueno.
BIOGRAPHY
A Los Angeles-based painter and marine biologist, Arnoldi earned her undergraduate degree, master’s degree, and PhD at Stanford University, where her scientific research focused on marine ecology and predator interactions.
Her paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and internationally, including the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, and Oregon State University’s Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (PRAx).