"The Crooked Timber"

     As you look around the Chester Arnold exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art you cannot escape the reoccurring theme in his work: Waste. Whether that waste is garbage, crumbling landscapes, or human struggles, Arnold's work has them all. One work caught my eye though because it is on a lesser scale than most. "The Crooked Timber" depicts a fallen tree, old and gnarled over grown with moss and lying across a small path cutting through a field. In the bottom corner, Arnold has painted a door, a piece of tin, a rake- just the sort of odd accumulation of trash that bombards his other paintings in the gallery. The crooked tree dominates the picture and as you look closer you can tell it fell from old age, not destroyed by man.
     Arnold was inspired by a quote from the eighteenth century German philosopher  Immanuel Kant "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no strait thing was ever made."( Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent" Kant 1784) in which Kant is referring to politics and the makings of constitution and governments and how man is not perfect so there is no way to make a perfect government from man. The whole quote reads " This task therefore is the hardest of all; indeed, its complete solution is impossible, for from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly strait can be built." (Kant)
     Arnold grew up in post war Germany where a new government was forming so I think that Arnold related to Kant's observation on politics. We can see that this is relateable  today with so many types of governments and how most, if not all, are flawed. At first, I thought Arnold's panting was nice, there wasn't much waste and destruction, until I read and researched about it. Now I realize it is fitting and quite appropriate in today's society. I respect Arnold's work and find it amusing that such political undertones are placed in a painting of a fallen tree.