Arnold Shives RCA (born December 27, 1943) is a Canadian multimedia artist and printmaker living in North Vancouver, British Columbia.
In 1966 he won a Carnegie Corporation of New York Fellowship and entered the Graduate Program in Painting and Sculpture at Stanford University (MA 1969) and studied with Frank Lobdell and Nathan Oliveira and came in contact with Elmer Bischoff and Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomadoro.
"[2] Not only this tendency but equally a spiritual search led Shives to learn of Saint Josemaria Escriva whose doctrines of freedom and understanding provided a point of reference for his visionary way of seeing nature, spirit and art.
Feeling the urgency to introduce colour, and influenced by jigsaw woodcut technique of Norwegian Edvard Munch, in 1975 he began creating large multi-colour block prints.
"[5] For another show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco Chronicle critic Abby Wasserman wrote: "Shives has some of the power and poetry of the landscapes by the late Lawren Harris of Canada's famous Group of Seven.
As literary critic and author, Trevor Carolan has written, "Thirty-five years into his vocation as a landscape-based painter, printmaker and sculptor, Vancouver's Arnold Shives still hears the Big Song in his walkabouts through British Columbia's backcountry...
In an easy, amoral age when the legitimacy of "risk" has become debased in our arts discourse as the adjective "legendary" has among rock journalists, Arnold Shives - painter, public individual, father of five, activist - puts it on the line for an etiquette of personal self-discipline, community harmony, and environmental responsibility.