Chester Arnold Art

Alex Westin
Candace Nicole
September 18th, 2010
Art Blog  #1

Worlds Apart, 1995
Artist: Chester Arnold

    I choose the Worlds Apart painting by Chester Arnold because it was the first thing in the exhibit I saw and it just blew me away with its massive size and powerful meanings. The painting approximately four-five feet tall has two massive cliffs that contain more rural housing that appear to be collapsing into a industrialized town on the bottom. Inside of the cliffs there are skeletons and a leaking sewage pipe which show things that are beneath the ground there.
    At a first glance I see this painting as showing that all the rural communities in the United States of America are dissolving and falling apart into the big industrialized urban cities. Down below the cliffs you see the smoke and what appears to be a factory ,which I took as big business and corporations because they are the root of evil that is descending on the rural communities these days.
    When I took a second look it could also resemble this destruction of all towns even the country. If you don't see the top of the cliff as a rural area then it could just be the fact that the country is falling apart do to maybe war, or bad political decisions considering Chester Arnold is a very political man. In all I really like this painting and it over all the other ones in the exhibit stood out to me the most.