After joining the army in the mid 1950s, he used the GI Bill to study painting at Mexico City College from 1957 to 1959, driving there over 12 days in an old bakery truck retrofitted as a camper.
Through his painting and writings, it is clear that D'Arcangelo had a palpable discomfort with the social mores of his time, which can be read in the detached treatment with which he treated his subjects.
D'Arcangelo first achieved recognition in 1962, when he was invited to contribute an etching to The International Anthology of Contemporary Engraving: America Discovered; his first solo exhibition came the next year, at the Thibaud Gallery in New York City.
Evidently, he didn't fit neatly in the category of Pop Art, though he shared subjects (women, signs, Superman) and techniques (stencil, assemblage) with these artists.
To D'Arcangelo, his style was less important than the subject matter he depicted and he believed that a culture of protest and resistance was more meaningful than any aesthetic concerns.
At first he touched on specific motifs in the contemporary American consciousness, such as President Kennedy's tragic death in "Place of Assassination" (1965) and environmental concerns in "Can Our National Bird Survive?"
These paintings also show a deep interest in the contradictions of flatness and perspective as represented on a canvas — ideas that, likewise, artists of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance pondered often.
Overall, D'Arcangelo makes an effort at distilling his subject matter into its most honest, intelligible, and synoptic descriptions; his paintings are interpretations of the American experience, not just his own memories.
"Marilyn" (1962) depicts an illustrative head and shoulders on which the facial features are marked by lettered slits to be "fitted" with the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth which appear off to the right in the composition.
In "Madonna and Child" (1963), the featureless faces of Jackie Kennedy and Caroline are ringed with haloes, enough to make their status as contemporary icons perfectly clear.
(1962) was painted the same year Rachel Carson published her seminal Silent Spring; its ambiguity also allows the viewer to interpret it as a statement about the Vietnam War.
The new pictures were rather scenic landscape vistas, simplified and showing his ongoing concern with jutting perspectival space, now inhabited by flatly painted images of highway overpasses, a jet wing, grain field, electric lines.
Now, as before, the main element in D'Arcangelo's pictures is the post-abstraction search for, as he put it, "icons that matter", monumental archetypes of the contemporary American expansive landscape highway.