In 1969 he was awarded the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Young Talent Award. He was invited to participate in Documenta V in Kassel, Germany in 1972 and went on to receive two NEA Artist Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Maestro Grant from the California Arts Council.
His work is in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.
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Arnoldi lives and works in Venice, CA.

Charles Arthur Arnoldi (born April 10, 1946) is an American abstract painter, sculptor, and printmaker. A versatile, ever evolving artist, known for working with non-traditional materials, Arnoldi has produced a hugely varied body of work. From traditional oil paintings on canvas, to bronze sculpture, monoprints, lithographs, “chainsaw paintings” (wood panels cut into with power saws), aluminum paintings and polyethylene wall reliefs, his vocabulary of artistic expression is constantly expanding.
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During his early career, he was known for his “stick paintings” where, instead of working on traditional canvas, he utilized actual tree branches as a vehicle to draw lines through space, employing shadow, depth and color to create powerful and expressionistic compositions. Those early explorations continue to inform his current work.