From childhood on, Gross Arnold was drawn to the beauties of nature. With his father and elder brother he often made shorter and longer creative excursions to the Turda Gorge (Tordai-hasadék) and all along the Arieș (Aranyos) valley, to spy out nature’s secrets. While their father painted in oils, he sat in the grass trying to capture the details of the landscape in pencil and watercolor. The forest, the brookside, and the meadow became his familiar, accustomed surroundings, and this closeness to nature fundamentally shaped his entire later oeuvre.
He was mad about beautiful minerals; finely patterned agates and lacy crystals fascinated him. From the 1980s onward he regularly attended the Hungarian mineral fairs. He was bound to Pálinkás László by an acquaintance of more than a quarter of a century; together they roamed Europe’s various mineral shows and collecting sites, sometimes by plane, sometimes by Trabant. They drove the Trabant to Idar-Oberstein, Europe’s gemstone capital, in what was then still West Germany, where — in the football-pitch-sized warehouse of one of the largest raw gemstone dealers — Arnold vanished into one of the barrels, his legs pointing at the sky! After a quarter of an hour of “digging” he popped out of the barrel, held up a wondrously patterned Brazilian agate, then, raising his finger to his bristly hair, declared in a tone that brooked no contradiction: “Here is the miracle — the true artist is nature; no painter could ever invent anything like this,” recalls Pálinkás László.

The Budapest Show, one of the largest mineral fairs in Hungary and in Central and Eastern Europe, moved exactly 10 years ago to the Hungarian Railway History Park — among trains, Arnold’s other great love. He had a solo exhibition at the 2007 show, and this year we are staging a commemorative exhibition to mark that anniversary.
During the exhibition, from August 25 to 27, the Arnoldo café will be closed to visitors.