Jason Louis Arkles was born in Washington, DC, one of five children of a woodworker and a quilter. His family moved to Michigan in 1975, and he went to school and discovered his two enduring interests: performing arts and sculpture. After attending college for a short time to study acting, he moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1992, joining a theatre collective in which he acted, wrote and directed plays, designed stage sets, and constructed "specialty" props, including severed limbs, a life-sized dinosaur, and scores of puppets.

In 1996, he traveled to Florence, Italy, where he met Charles Cecil, an accomplished portrait and landscape painter who heads a small, private atelier in Florence's oldest working artist's studio. Mr. Cecil hired Jason to assist in the construction and outfitting of a new studio for sculpture, a medium not previously offered to the pupils at the atelier. In January 1997, the sculpture room was completed, and Jason stayed on as studio assistant. In April of that same year, Jason became the department's head.

Charles H. Cecil Studio is a school of fine art in the naturalistic tradition of drawing and oil painting. The curriculum stems directly from the major realist ateliers of nineteenth-century Paris. Cecil was trained in these techniques by the Boston painter R. H. Ives Gammell and his pupil Richard F. Lack. Gammell's teacher William M. Paxton had studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

After having learned the main points of the Studio's techniques in drawing, Jason's task was to transpose this technique into a curriculum for three-dimensional work. In effect, the sculpture department at Charles H. Cecil Studios was an experiment in regaining a nearly lost sculptural tradition; the program is the only fine arts school in the world offering this particular method of training.

In June of 2000, the National Sculpture Society awarded him the George Gach Prize, for his entry in the National Sculpture Competition, and the Gloria Medal for his meritorious body of work. Since then Jason has taken part in national and regional exhibitions too numerous to list, from New York to Washington, DC to Chapel Hill.

Since 2003 Jason has divided his time between his studios in Florence and North Carolina, devoting his career to monumental statuary and monuments. His teaching atelier, Studio Della Statua, opened in 2010 in Florence, where he passes on the tradition of figurative sculpture to a small number of students. He is currently working on the second edition of his handbook on the technique of sight-size sculpture.

Even with his essentially 19th century training, Jason has no desire to 'turn back the clock' and ignore or discredit abstraction and mannerism in art of the past century. He firmly believes that the art of the twenty-first century will be a continuation of the theoretical and psychological progress of Modern art, synthesized with a much-needed return to Nature as the source of stimulus and motive in creative work.