Artist Quips Her Way Through 85th Birthday

Florence (Flossie) Arnold and A.B. (Buck) Catlin worked the crowd like a longtime vaudeville comedy team, but their act was as new as their friendship is old.

Catlin, the mayor of Fullerton, was at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center Sunday to present a key to the city to Arnold, whom he has known since 1947. The presentation was part of a birthday party that included clowns, a magic act and the opening of an Arnold retrospective: 25 paintings that span her 35-year artistic career. (The paintings will be on display until Nov. 1.)

As the mayor gave Arnold the key, mounted on a plaque with the city seal and the inscription, “The Key to Our Hearts . . . in appreciation for your dedication to the advancement of cultural arts in Fullerton,” he mentioned Arnold’s 85 years.

But “we’re all the same age,” Arnold said, waving her hand toward some of the 162 people who had come to the open-to-the-public party.

“By ordinance, we’re all the same age,” Catlin pronounced as the audience laughed.

He was not giving her a big proclamation, Catlin said, because “you told me one time . . . “

” . . . I have all the whereases I need,” Arnold finished for him.

When the plaque was in her hands, Arnold looked it over and said, “Oh, lovely. Does it (the key) open all the doors down at City Hall?”

“It’ll do everything except fix a ticket,” Catlin assured her.

Arnold gave a short speech in which she mentioned that, “speaking of birthdays,” the Muckenthaler Center she helped start is now 21 years old. Then she tackled her birthday cake. Appropriately enough, the cake was a reproduction of one of her “hard-edge” paintings, two-dimensional abstract works composed of blocks and curves of color.

Over the years, Arnold’s paintings have won her some international recognition. She’s had shows around Southern California and outside it (her paintings have traveled to exhibits in Madrid, Copenhagen, Florence, Rome, Milan and Venice), and she’s listed in “Who’s Who in American Art” and the “Dictionary of International Biography.” Her papers and memorabilia were sent to the Smithsonian Institution a dozen years ago.

But while Arnold is “recognized, all right, I think she’s under-recognized,” said Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, a Laguna Beach artist and art historian who wrote the book, “American Women Artists,” published in 1982.

“She really doesn’t go out and push her work, although it gets bought anyway,” Rubinstein, an Arnold friend since 1970, said in a telephone interview. “She has a delight in color, in light, in feeling harmony in the world . . . her (art) has a kind of buoyancy or delight in it. It’s very pristine, clear, bright.”

Yet, Rubinstein added, while Arnold is a good painter, “she refuses to hole up in a garret. She cares just as much about community and helping people” as about art.

“She’s Mrs. Fullerton . . . she’s there if you need her.”

Many of those who turned out to wish “Mrs. Fullerton” happy birthday Sunday were old friends, although some of them--including a few toddlers--were new acquaintances. After Catlin presented the key to the city, they watched Cal State Fullerton music department head David Thorsen, a private art student of Arnold, perform magic tricks. Then four members of California Clowns, a group of volunteer entertainers, put on a show.

Taught in Schools

It was all in keeping with the spirit of the woman who taught music, art and social studies in Orange County schools between 1923, when she arrived in Fullerton, and 1966, and who helped start a Fullerton Children’s Art Festival in 1975.

In an interview last week, Arnold said she wasn’t surprised to be getting a party from the Muckenthaler, or recognition at a Friday evening Friends of Cal State Fullerton picnic. “It’s pretty hard to surprise me,” she claimed. “I’m not surprised, I’m delighted--that anybody wants to look at anything that’s 85.”

Sitting in the house she’s inhabited since 1948, Arnold projected a kindly presence frequently quickened with humor. Within the last decade she’s undergone both a heart bypass operation and cataract surgery, but her handshake is firm and her walk fairly steady, while the eyes behind the thick glasses don’t seem to miss much.

Her house is a gracious place, full of comfortable furniture, decorated in the style of another era. There are even ruffled curtains on the living room windows.

“When people come and see the ruffles on the curtains and the traditional furniture, they’re surprised,” she laughed, because they expect more modern furnishings from a modern abstract artist. “I tell them, ‘I had the house and all my surroundings long before I started painting.’ ” Some of her oils decorate the walls. “I think they fit in very well,” she commented. “They’re the quiet spot” in each room.

Married 60 Years

Married 60 years to Archie Arnold, a retired pharmacist, Arnold said she and her mate have maintained distinct identities during their long union. “One and one does not make one,” she said, holding up two fingers and demonstrating the impossibility of blending them into a single digit. “We’re two people, two very distinct people who have been married for 60 years. This business of homogeneity doesn’t work.

“I don’t know that I could live with somebody like me; I’d probably have killed (him) long ago.” (While accepting the award from Catlin at the Muckenthaler Sunday, she requested “a cheer for Archie, (who) put up with me for 60 years.”) The couple had one child, a daughter who’s a social studies teacher in the Fresno area.

The daughter of a suffragist mother and an engineer father, Arnold has survived her two brothers and one sister. “I’m the last of the Mohicans,” she said. “I’m 85, sometimes I feel like I’m 95, but it’s wonderful, it’s been a great life. . . .

“We’re all the same age,” she said, using one of her favorite lines. “All everybody has is one day. All the yesterdays are plowed under. What can you do about yesterday? What can you do about tomorrow? All you have is today. All you can do is squeeze all the juice out and enjoy it.”

Told a friend had described her as a Christian Scientist, Arnold demurred. “I don’t think the Christian Scientists would claim me,” she said. Instead, she subscribes to “the philosophy of ‘can do,’ the art of positive thinking.”

In her lifetime, Arnold has done a great deal. In addition to her teaching and her involvement with the Muckenthaler’s activities, in 1964 she was one of the prime movers behind establishing the annual “Night in Fullerton,” an April event that presents a wide range of cultural activities to the public. In 1973, she was named Fullerton’s Woman of the Year.

She’s on the board of directors of the Fullerton Girls Club and belongs to both the Laguna Beach Museum of Art and the Newport Harbor Art Museum, with paintings in both institutions’ collections. A past president of the Orange County Art Assn. and a charter member of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she also belongs to the Cal State Fullerton Art Alliance board of directors. (Thirty Arnold prints are on display at the university this month.)

She began to paint in 1950, enrolling in a Fullerton College adult education course at the insistence of friends who wanted to fill the class. “They grabbed me off the street,” she said. She continued attending Fullerton College until one day her instructor told her to go home, paint alone and not return before she’d finished and framed five canvases.

The framer to whom she took her first finished pieces was Karl Benjamin, a seminal figure in what would become known as the “hard-edge” movement. (In “hard-edge” paintings, clearly defined blocks of color are juxtaposed to create abstract paintings that are “flat,” seldom producing a sense of three-dimensional depth.) Benjamin became Arnold’s next teacher. In the years that followed, when Arnold arrived at his Claremont shop with a new batch of paintings, Benjamin often called in his friends.

He’d tell them, “ ‘Flossie’s here with some new paintings,’ and they would come in and argue about them and kick them around--ideas, that is,” Arnold said. “Listening to these young men criticize these paintings is how I really learned” to paint.

“There are people who, if you criticize them, they curl up like a sow bug, and I think the only way you can learn anything in this world is to have someone who will tear it (a piece of work) apart,” Arnold expounded. “Being sensitive to criticism in this world is a grave fault.

“You can only do your best; angels can do more.”

Her paintings, Arnold said, “are minimalist paintings, and if they don’t work, they’re very bad, there’s nowhere to hide.” Each painting is “color and shape, that’s all it means to me. . . .

“A painting is like listening to music, you only understand what you’ve experienced,” she added. “Music is abstract to me, the same way contemporary painting is abstract. The color and shapes are enough for me. . . . But I combine those colors and shapes to make oneness. It’s a oneness, it’s a thing in itself. That’s all it is. There’s nothing occult about it. Don’t try to find the horse’s head, or the house, or the tree” in the paintings.

Limits Her Painting

Once upon a time Arnold painted for long hours, first in her own kitchen and later in the small separate studio she and Archie built behind their house. Nowadays, however, “being 85 years old, I find there are certain limits to my stamina,” she said. When she paints, she still works for three or four hours at a time, but she does not paint every day.

Once an avid traveler who went to the Soviet Union with a delegation of American women in 1971, Arnold also traveled extensively on her own. (Asked if Archie usually went with her, she said, “Heavens, no! I don’t take him traveling . . . . He’s always hunting for the fire escapes.”) She’s been to England, parts of Europe, India, Africa, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico. Her last big trip was in 1980.

“I’m not curious any more, I’ve seen all the sights I’m curious about,” she said. “I’ve seen enough of the world that I’ve sampled it, and I’m glad to be living in Fullerton.”

Still, she doesn’t intend to begin sitting on her hands, she added. “In this world you have to live until you die, unless a tree falls on you. That was one of my mother’s bon mots. You don’t retire.”

“Life,” she philosophized, “is a mirror. You get back just exactly what you give. And then if you’re lucky, you wake up tomorrow.”