• "Convergence: The Work of Arnold Chao", The Buzz Newsletter, San Jose Art League, 2002
• image of "Infiltration", Wave Magazine (November issue), 2002
  
• image of "Transcendence", Wave Magazine(December issue), 2003
  
• image of "Cold Soul", Wave Magazine(February issue), 2004
• image of "Civilization", Santa Clara Review (vol. 93 #1), 2006

The Chicano muralist Eduardo Carrillo once said that an artist doesn’t really find his style until the age of 50. Little did he know that one of his own students would prove him wrong.

At 28, Arnold Chao is a man with a vision — his own.

“I’ve found something I can hold onto,” Chao says of his recent turn toward abstract composition. His newest series, the aptly named Convergence, focuses on complex intersections of color and shape that generate a sense of motion reminiscient of the Futurists a century ago. The revolutionary Italian art movement has influenced Chao’s work, as have the Neoplasticists, who advocated art as an expression of the absolutes of life, rather than the depiction of actual objects.

“Realism,” he says, “is just not for me. For me, art is about introspection and kind of a universal beauty that isn’t really what we see in everyday life.”

Several of the paintings from Convergence are scattered around the walls of the living room in his Santa Clara home, while the rest are in storage. The series will be on the road in a couple of weeks toward its new temporary home at Orchard Valley Coffee in historic downtown Campbell, where the San Jose Art League is featuring Chao in a two-month solo exhibit that opens Nov. 1, 2002.

Chao describes his artistic journey as a long one in which he received steady encouragement along the way. With a mother who was an accomplished musician and artist herself, he found much support at home, and with teachers throughout classes at elementary and high school.

It’s Carrillo he remembers best as a mentor, however. An influential member of the faculty at UC-Santa Cruz, where Chao double-majored in fine art and psychology, Carrillo offered Chao equal measures of constructive criticism and positive feedback, as well as an intuitive understanding that Chao found unusual in an instructor.

“Carrillo would look at something of mine and understand it before I even explained it, which was rare. Most of the other art teachers just thought I was on drugs,” he laughs, noting the Surrealist bent of his college-era work.

“It was a good test of skills,” he says of Surrealism. “To create your own figures, create your own environment, make landscapes out of nothing. You base it on certain things that you see, but otherwise you’re just creating your own realm.”

Art served as a form of self-analysis in those days, he explains. “I was very into dreamlike, fantasy work, very influenced by Dali, using art as psychoanalysis, doing things that were very sporadic, spontaneous—just whatever came to mind, interpreting the work after I finished.”

His work had such personal value that for awhile none of it was for sale.

“I just enjoyed looking back at what I’d done and saying, ‘This is where I was’ … looking back at a stage of my life. But you have to reach a certain point where you let go and share.”

With graduation came the realization that he would need to survive in the ‘real world,’ that art was not enough to get by. After a brief foray into social work, he entered the high-tech field, and has several years’ tenure at Yahoo!, where he now holds the officious title of “core surfer” and develops Yahoo!’s web directory.

Pursuing art on the side is not easy, Chao acknowledges. “It’s hard to keep the drive after you’ve used up most of it during eight hours at work, then coming home and trying to refocus yourself and do something completely different. I try to paint every day or on certain days, but I definitely don’t do it as much as I want to.”

High tech and art aren’t mutually exclusive, however—Chao has run his own website ‘gallery’ since 1997. His current site, prints,” he says. “In the industry, that’s kind of a given. Nobody’s going to buy anything over $500 that they don’t get to touch and see.”

In any case, Chao is dubious that a website image could accurately convey the complexity of a work of art, particularly an artwork in his favored medium of oils.

“With oils you’re capable of making a lot of opaque layers, creating a very complex color composition,” he explains. “There are slight subtleties that reproductions and photographs can’t really document.”

Given his recent trend of painting “deep,” using layer upon layer of color, Chao is particularly sensitive to this problem with online art. As he waits for each coat to dry, he takes refuge in his other love—music. A bass/guitar player with the rock band The Working Poor, Chao has played venues throughout California, including such famed L.A. nightspots as The Roxy Theatre and The Viper Room.

“The beautiful part of music is, you can share in the creating of it with a group,” he says. “Even at an artist’s reception you’re still not in the physical action of creating art—you’re just showing what you’ve already produced. Each art has its benefits and its advantages. But visual art is more introspective. It’s a very lonely art.”

It was for this reason that Chao went searching for a community of artists, and found one in the San Jose Art League. He has been a member for about a year.

“Marketing your art takes as much—if not more—time than creating the art itself,” he says, acknowledging that belonging to an organization such as the San Jose Art League not only brings networking opportunities but goes a long way toward getting artists noticed in the community at large.

The exhibit at Orchard Valley Coffee is sure to bring nothing if not recognition—the coffee house is one of the most heavily trafficked in the South Bay. But even after achieving such a level of exposure, Chao is determined to continue taking risks—whatever that may bring.

“If there’s no pain in making something, if you’re not experimenting, you’re not really moving forward,” he says. “And I think that’s a very important part of art. You have to make mistakes and accept it.”