The University of the Arts MFA Program in Ceramics, Painting and Sculpture welcomed two titans of painting, Charles Arnoldi and Gregory Amenoff, for an East Coast/West Coast Conversation moderated by MFA CPS Director Joe Girandola on Friday, December 4, 2009. The "painting debate," which was held in conjunction with the program's Thesis Exhibition 2009, took place in Hamilton Hall's CBS Auditorium.

Chuck Arnoldi
Charles Arnoldi is very much an artist of his era and culture, and, at the same time, a singular artist with a distinctive, unique voice. From the time he assembled his first expressive, deceptively simple twig and stick paintings—soon after entering the Chouinard Art Institute and then winning the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Young Talent Purchase Award—the driven, experimental artist never looked back." 
-Sam Hunter, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Greg Amenoff
"Even though Gregory Amenoff apparently still believes in content, he is one of the best painters around. The content: weirdly involuted, abstract forms that resemble micro-organisms becomes a vehicle for the sultry, turbulent density of Amenoff’s painterliness. Like all good painterliness, his is emblematic of an emotional state, in his case one fraught with a tension that seems about to burst its bounds. Indeed, without the containment and control provided by organic shape, Amenoff’s painterliness would be blindly impulsive, a kind of vertiginous swirl of violent energy. His painting seems propelled by an ecstatic urgency. As in the best instinctive painting, there is a sense of ecstatic response to the mystery of naturea kind of onomatopoeic recapitulation, in painterly terms, of its generative power."  
-Donald Kuspit, Artforum review