Florence Arnold

Born in Prescott, Arizona, Florence Arnold settled in Fullerton in 1923. She earned a degree in music from Mills College, and a BA Degree from the University of Southern California. She taught music for 42 years. It was not until 1947 that she says that she began to paint seriously. By the late 1950s she began to associate with a group of artists based in Claremont: her teacher and friend Karl Benjamin, Paul Darrow, Doug McClelland, Frederick Hammersley, and Jack Zajac. She was inspired by John McLaughlin abstract works. Her style, mature by the early 1960s, fell into abstract classicism, or hard-edge, as defined by Jules Langser in the late 1950s for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, Four Abstract Classicists. By the 1970s her non-representational paintings hung in museums and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. She was a force in the cultural development of Fullerton that included co-founding the Night in Fullerton and being a founding member of the Muckenthaler Cultural Center. She died at 93 from natural causes in Fullerton.