"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.