Our Strength Alone

I found Chester Arnold’s work very moving and something that I could relate to and really understand the meanings he is trying to impose.  Even before I saw his image of the Tower of Babel at the Nevada Museum of Art, I knew right away that it was going to be the one I was going to write about.  His version is a cross between Pieter Brueghel’s Tower of Babel and the story line of Icarus called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.  This painting is very striking and beautifully painted, using dark colors giving you the feeling of destruction.  Your eye is directly drawn to the focus of the painting, a steep mountain shaped like a volcano that closely resembles the shape of the tower of Babel in Brueghel’s piece.  Like the tower, the mountain is desolate with no trees or any form of plant life on it.  In the Bible men were building the Tower of Babel so they could reach the Heavens, but when God saw this He was displeased and they where scattered upon the earth and their languages were confounded and made different.

  Human achievements are something that become natural to us each and everyday, much like the mountain in Arnold’s painting that was left there by nature, it’s just something that is part of the norm for us.  Along this mountain and winding all around it is road filled with cars that have their entire luggage and things strapped to the roof.  I saw the correlation to the Tower of Babel by everyone wanting to reach the heavens, but in our modern times it’s everyone wanting to make it as high as they can go.  Now we measure reaching the heavens by fame, fortune and success, always gathering more things as we go along to the top.  However a lot of our attempts end in failure and that is seen at the lower right hand side of the picture with the man who was climbing to the top all on his own, but then his rope snapped and he is left falling to the bottom.

 God wasn’t displeased with men because they were building a tower, He was displeased because they thought they could get to heaven on their own without Him.  Because of the motives behind their doings, their plans failed.  Just like the climber in Arnold’s painting.  Icarus was they same way, he abandoned all reason given to him by his father, that he went out and flew anyways only to end up in peril.  The plane crashing into the water at the bottom of the mountain is the modern representation of Icarus.  The rocks falling on the right side of the picture are a representation of everything falling apart in ruins and the light coming from the sky to the right of the painting is God watching from the heavens.  It is like everything is falling and if you take notice its one man and one plane falling all alone.  In his work everything is falling and there is nothing in mans power to stop it.

  I think Chester Arnold is trying to tell people through his works, that as people we cannot accomplish anything on our own and what we do accomplish it’s all going to fade away.  This is something that is evident through his other paintings where things are left in land fields, scattered everywhere. Like in his work Fate of Durable Goods, with the pile of ruble floating along in the sea.  He is trying to speak to a materialistic world through his art, that getting to the very top and accumulating the most things is not what matters.  It’s all only going to turn into junk and fall apart anyways.