In a stretch of programming – on topics like whales switching the types of prey they eat, to the longest migrating animals – the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History drops in a solo art show.
It’s by Natalie Arnolidi, a Pacific Grove transplant who studied oceanography and marine policy at Stanford with Dr. Barbara Block, tagging great white sharks off Año Nuevo. Arnoldi is pursuing a PhD in marine ecology at Hopkins Marine Station under Dr. Fiorenza Micheli.
“My study is near shore coral reefs and offshore open ocean systems, the connections between habitats and healthy ecosystems,” she says. “We’ve been doing that research in Palau.”
Both her science work and creative work began about 10 years ago.
“When you strip away the methodologies and cultures, art and science are both creative problem solving,” she says.
The daughter of Los Angeles artist Charles Arnoldi, Natalie grew up surfing in Southern California. But having lived in Northern California for years, coastal fog has permeated her large scale paintings, which are stark and hazy, dominated by shades of charcoal blacks and washed out grays. She merged both in a 2016 show at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, made up of dark portraits of sharks and ocean horizons lit by lightning.
Some of that work will be in the museum – the ones that fit through the doors.
The shark portraits came about in a conversation she had on a research vessel with Dr. Block and others about how the Discovery Channel’s sensationalized Shark Week was doing more harm than good in teaching about sharks.
“I thought about portraiture, how we memorialize people and places,” Arnoldi says. Scientists can identify the same great whites by their dorsal fins and behaviour (they give them nicknames, too), so she painted portraits of them.
Still, they come with that stark color scheme, which she says is received by some people as foreboding, and others as serene. She says that any emotional reaction is valid and welcome.
“Scientists are impartial, but the currency of art is emotion.”