Maya Lin's creation in Washington D.C, the Vietnam Memorial, stands simple, sleek, and dark, reflecting back the lively surroundings with a somber, but poignant reminder of the deaths sacrificed to the United States during the Vietnam War. Along the wall is a list of all the casualties suffered in the war, listed in alphabetical order by year. Looking at the wall I find it hard to avoid the emotions aroused from the structure, having several friends that are currently in Aghanistan and Iraq, I suffer the touching reminder that just as easily their names could end up on a list. I think Maya Lin's design is ingenious, it shows simplicity, solitude, and stillness, a kind of self-realization, that I don't believe could as easily be conveyed by an enormous statue. The blackness of the wall reflects back the viewer, like a division between their lives and the one's lost, that cannot be crossed, but only remembered and honored.

Drifting

Treaty Signing at Medicine Creek Lodge

John Taylor and Howling Wolf depicted the same scene, a treating singing at Medicine Creek, yet both artists conveyed the scene in completely different perspectives. Taylor’s art, more representational than Wolf’s, depicts a scene of bare-chested, stern looking Native Americans sitting among a glade of well-dressed ‘civilized’ person. Taylor’s landscape is a realistic image of trees and people, spatially abiding by the laws of the nature. In sharp contrast Howl’s art the artwork is not linear and mathematical, but scattered and flowing, abstract, it is lacking the ingrained details that Taylor display. He uses chiefly primary colors that lack any shading, the trees are short and parallel to the height of the tents. There are a great number of Native Americans and few white people, who are settled around their own glade, while a number of Native American’s watch. Taylor also circulates most of his focus in the center of the piece, whereas Wolf has no specific focal point. Furthermore the depiction of the people themselves varies greatly, there are a large number of woman in Wolf’s piece, almost entirely, they have red in their hair an native American sign of commitment, suggesting that Wolf’s society values their woman more, or at least that their woman have a greater influence in Native American society, starkly contrary to Taylor who depicts no woman in his artwork.

Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollowitz was a truly melancholy artist, very potent in her strong, almost masculine strokes, and protective fierceness her artwork reflects her love of children and the poignant loss of her own. Several of her pieces also show images of weak, broken women, a reflection of the sickness and poverty seen as she was growing up in Germany, and her own unabashed dismay of it. Stranded in a very poor part of Germany during both World Wars, she was a first hand witness to the suffering of the urban poor, reflecting it in her artwork with morbid, dark images. Her images of motherhood also correspond directly to her own loss of her son in WWI and the death of her grandson in WWII. Kollowitz work is powerful, gloomy, and truthful, showing her own feelings of horror at the misfortune she had seen around her. Few of the images are very realistic or direct correspondents to what she was seeing, but rather abstracted, surreal images of her own emotions that saturated her art in shadows and rank oppression.

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

Kaitlyn Lattimer
9/8/2010
Art 160

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

Chester Arnold’s sublime and powerful artwork is a clever, indistinct mold of nature and humankind, depicting multiple scenes of grim, razed landscapes and battered scopes of nature that are the modern recordation of human-environmental interactions. Displayed in Reno, Nevada’s Museum of Fine Art, at the ‘Between Heaven and Earth Gallery’, September 8, 2010. Chester Arnold has an array of artwork that accurately and forebodingly predicted the consequences of environmental abuse seen in contemporary society, enormous canvases showcase lonesome tire-dumps, hordes of abandoned trash, and sickly landscapes of hollowed out mountains are only a few of his grim warnings.
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” shows a bleak landscape of a majestic, towering mountain that has been stripped and processed into a shallow replication of its previous self. Deeply lined cavities of dreary browns and black scar the mountainside, as an eerie green run-off pond sits at the base of the mountain. Several encroaching layers of miners can be seen digging further into the mountain, as a winding congested two lane-highway weaves across the landscape. A pile of smoke, billowing from the mountain side is the remainder of a crashed plane, toppling into the ground below.
Named after the foolish lad Icarus, the artwork accurately describes the possible fate of those that do not heed warnings and blindly, foolishly move forward without regard to the possible dangers. According to Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the master crafter that had constricted the labyrinth to contain the violent Minotaur, imprisoned by King Minos; Daedalus constructed two pairs of wings for him and his son. The wings worked and escaping from their dungeon was effortless, exuberated by his new-found freedom, Icarus, ignored his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus went higher and higher, until the wax on his feathers melted and he plummeted to the sea, and ultimately his death. Much like Icarus, mankind has a habit to continually push for change, constantly searching for the newest, greatest thing, without regard to what may arise from such advancements.
“Landscape with Fall of Icarus” is also comparable to Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “The Tower of Babel”, sharing similar compositions and messages. The Tower of the Babel is the biblical story in which the legions of men, celebrating their accomplishments and greatness planned to build a tower in their honor; the tower was constructed from all the nations of the world. The tower angered God, because it wasn’t built in his honor, in punishment God scattered the men across the earth, breaking the unified language so the men could no longer communicate. The tower was left to slow negligence and abandonment. In his painting Arnold is hoping to convey that in mankind’s eagerness to obstruct and celebrate their own greatness they no longer pay tribute to the cores of their success, and in doing so, degrade that which surrounds them, such as the natural environment.