Whether seen from a bird’s-eye view or scrutinized at close range, the world described by Chester Arnold’s landscapes is a beautiful but ominous place. On remote-looking granite peaks or in bleak strip mines, next to a busy anthill or in the burnt remains of a forest, fascinating disasters both natural and entirely man-made regularly threaten to unfold.

The dark narratives hinted at in these expansive canvases (most measure six feet along at least one dimension) have been pieced together from a number of sources, not the least of which is Arnold’s particularly poetic imagination. As in Arnold’s