Linda Arnold is an award-winning landscape painter, whose recent work captures the dynamic tension between representation and abstraction. While her paintings distill landscapes down to their essence, she keeps certain elements to ground her work, such as the horizon line, as she gives herself the freedom to push color and design. In this way, her landscapes can be read either as a perspective on the natural world or as a uniting of abstract forms. The colors in her paintings play against each other, creating lyrical movement and patterns of light and shadow. An accomplished plein air painter, Linda Arnold has had the opportunity to paint in many different locations around the United States, Europe and Latin America for over thirty years. Most recently she was chosen as the 2011 Andy Warhol Artist in Residence, a prestigious award given to an artist to pursue artistic endeavors at the Andy Warhol Preserve in Montauk, Long Island. Arnold says, “I have always loved the act of painting a place many times, and feel that painting and repainting allows the artist to get to know a place in the same way we get to know another person. The artist is fully immersed in the experience and almost becomes part of the landscape. In that contemplation I find I can let the place take over.”Linda Arnold had a solo exhibition at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art (SAMA) in Ligonier Valley, Pennsylvania in the spring of 2016.