Though gorgeously rendered, Chester Arnold’s paintings don’t idealize the state of nature. It depicts how, despite humanity’s best efforts, the Earth endures the accumulation of humanity’s waste and development. Cascading piles of tires and trash becomes their own mountainous formations.
“American by birth, but raised in post-war Germany during the formative years of his childhood, Chester Arnold is interested in the capacity of painting to convey the complexities of the human psyche,” Catharine Clark Gallery says. “His compositions present skewed linear perspectives that place the viewer at a remove, above and beyond an unfolding narrative. The romantic beauty of natural landscapes, in part informed by historic master Caspar David Friedrich, is subverted by Arnold’s preoccupation with the detritus of human accumulation.”
Find more of Arnold’s work on his website.
This Thursday, October 9, 
In 
Nichole Rae Klein’s oil and egg tempera paintings blend ordinary beings and unearthly flourishes. Those timeless materials, in particular, add a tension to the artist’s scenes and portraits. The painter says her process is time consuming, but the “slowness provides me enough time to look around the scene and notice what my subject might have missed during their attempt to keep everything under control.”