Van Arno was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He was accepted at Otis Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, where he studied under Carol Caroompas and Lita Albquerque. As a young illustrator his work appeared on album covers, video game box art, and nightclub posters around the city. By the late '80s, he began producing large cut-out paintings.

In the early '90s he became fascinated with the calendar of the ancient Maya, and traveled to the Yucatan to see the ruins at Chichen Itza, Coba, and Tulum. At the same time, he began to create heroic figurative works featuring religious and folk heroes from Christian, Mayan, and American history (St. Francis, John Barrymore, Joan of Arc, Nat Turner, Nellie Bly) in cell vinyl on masonite. This work was shown extensively in Los Angeles, Seattle, Santa Fe, Nashville, and New York.

Van Arno has frequently been featured in Juxtapoz magazine since 1999. In the spring of 2000, several of his pieces were included in a national survey of lowbrow painters at the Hollywood Art and Culture Center in Florida. In the fall of 2000, he painted a 36-foot billboard for the East Side Artcrawl entitled AAbolitionist Goat War@ which received local news coverage for its indictment of pimp culture.

More recently, he has been exclusively painting in oil on canvas and wood panels.

On October 5, 2008, Van Arno is hosting a workshop in Los Angeles. Click here to learn more.

Van Arno
Samson Remembers The Foxes, 2007
Oil on canvas
36 x 24 in.
Courtesy the artist

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