By Farwa Ali
Graceful, veined hands turn the seashell over in reverent contemplation. A few moments later, artist Ann Arnold tosses the seashell back into the waves lapping against the sand at San Francisco’s Baker Beach. In the documentary, Wrestling The Angel – An Artist’s Passage, this shell accompanies Arnold through a cancer diagnosis, and provides inspiration for her healing. This lyrical film offers a meditation on creativity, mortality, and this earthly body we call home.
Early in the film, we see Arnold studying the shell as she paints its tiny ridges and delicate spiral. “The seashell is in many ways emblematic of the dark mystery and transient nature of life. Its beauty lies in its impermanence,” observes the director, Jonathan Villet. Once the house of a living creature, the shell is now empty, its occupant gone. Yet it has become an artifact, a thing of beauty that Arnold honors in her painting. As she lets it go, she acknowledges impermanence and relinquishes control over her fate, accepting whatever life has in store.
Villet and his wife, cinematographer Fiona McDougall, show how ordinary, everyday objects can help us weather life’s challenges as they shine the spotlight on Arnold, a much-loved and well-respected fine art painter in Berkeley, CA. Shortly after Arnold received a cancer diagnosis in 2022, the filmmakers began to track her progress. The story they tell is one of creativity and resilience. Arnold’s deep and almost spiritual connection to her art allows her to process her illness and find joy in everyday life. As art historian Lynne Ambrosini writes, “After watching Wrestling the Angel, I felt refreshed, as though I had just dipped into a pure blue lake of wisdom and beauty.”
Arnold has long been fascinated with Greek fables and biblical tales. Her depiction of Aesop’s story of The Ant and The Grasshopper asks us to consider how we spend our days and what we want from life. The filmmakers have animated Arnold’s enchanting illustrations and set them to music. We watch the grasshopper enjoying life to the fullest, playing his fiddle on long summer days—while the ant labors to amass a storehouse for the coming winter. The fable weighs our ability to live for the moment against our need for planning and certainty.
Arnold understands the grasshopper. Instead of chasing commercial success, she has always painted things that give her pleasure. It is time at the easel—not the commercial aspects of the art world–that she values.
In addition, Arnold considers the Biblical tale of Jacob wrestling the angel—a potent metaphor for confronting the unknown. Jacob fights with a stranger, who turns out to be a messenger of god, and he will not let go until he receives a blessing. During their struggle, Jacob is wounded, and left with a limp. Arnold, too, bears a scar, but in addition, her cancer has changed her and given her a new perspective. “One may not comprehend the meaning or reason in the midst of the battle,” she says, “but it unfolds in time.”
Villet was captivated when Arnold retold Jacob’s story as if it were part of her own creative process. The filmmaker realized he was “watching a bigger metaphor unfold. In her retelling, Arnold wisely asks: How can we each find a blessing in our wound?” The film maintains an uplifting tone, inspiring people to ponder their challenges and to slow down enough to appreciate life’s hidden marvels. As Arnold notes, “Wrestling the Angel” need not be a stressful or morbid task. It requires an open heart and a willingness to find meaning amidst life’s fragility.
This intimate film showcases Arnold’s work as a visual storyteller. The book projects she completed with her husband, antiquarian bookseller Ian Jackson who died in 2018, convey a sophisticated humor. In an alphabet for the children of friends the letter ‘B’ unexpectedly stands for barbed wire and ‘C’ for Cleopatra, a wanton, wasteful girl “dissolving in a glass of wine a valuable pearl.”
In addition, Arnold has created playful, watercolor illustrations for books by Alice Waters, founder of the Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. Fanny in France conveys the delights of childhood and the French countryside in colorful picnic scenes. After Waters viewed the documentary, she observed: “It captures Ann in her element, speaking eloquently, and plainly, about many of the values she and I both share – beauty, simplicity, a love of nature, a love of food.”
A contemplative film, Wrestling the Angel, is not a cancer documentary. Rather, it conveys how an artistic mind faces mortality. Throughout, Arnold embraces the present and meditates on the gifts from life. Delectable figs, fuzzy red blush apricots, ripe cucumbers, rosy apples, juicy pears, sesame seed covered artisan bread, ripe melons, soft cheese, organic eggs, vintage teapots and butter knives, good conversations at the kitchen table. In the film, Arnold has a fresh appreciation for the daily gifts of life. Her son Aldo notes that he lives in an “artist’s encampment” given his mother’s penchant for creating art all over the house.
Over time, resilience emerges as Arnold’s theme. Since recovering from cancer, she has been working on ceramic tiles of the California Pipevine Butterfly. “Going through my own rite of passage,” she says, “has made me particularly attuned to the life stages of these mystical insects, especially as they echo my own experience of rebirth.”
Learn about local showings of Wrestling the Angel and how to watch this film here
Follow the film on Facebook and Instagram
Find artwork by Ann Arnold on Instagram and Facebook
Read her article in Reinventing Home on Painting and Illustrating
Check Stinehour Editions for more of Arnold’s paintings and books.
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Farwa Ali is an independent journalist who has covered the rights of native people in the Andaman Islands and groundbreaking discoveries in virology during the Covid pandemic. She writes about American and international politics, human rights, and holds a Master’s degree in Global Security Studies from Johns Hopkins University. A longer version of this article, with more information about the filmmakers, appeared on the Bay Area website, eatdrinkfilms.com
Ann Arnold holds the copyright for all paintings, illustrations and tile work shown in this review.
