Chairman's Message
This year the ARC Salon™ has continued to rapidly grow in popularity. More artists are submitting works and on average each participant is entering more examples of their work.
This clearly is another positive sign of the ongoing shift in the way artists want to be trained and in the kinds of work they are interested in producing ... works which express our shared humanity and communicate all of life's nuances, from the depths of despair to the highest peaks of human experience, emotion and achievement. It has now become legitimate for artists to want to create poetically rendered works of beauty, joy and inspiration. I am happy that we at the Art Renewal Center® are playing a crucial role in helping this true expression of art to grow and flourish.
Permit me to share our vision of cultural transformation which ARC has helped set in motion, a transformation made possible along with our thousands of friends and associates who run ARC's Approved Ateliers and Academy schools, who enter the ARC Salon, Scholarship and related competitions, and who run realism oriented art galleries, organize museum exhibitions of ARC Living Artists and Living Masters, who collect and purchase great humanist works, and to all our supporters who are there with us committed to loving and adoring poetically crafted and emotionally charged masterpieces of classical and humanist realism. Thank you all for throwing your hats into the ring with us and for doing what you can to help end a century of Modernist indoctrination, helping us create a 21st Century art world that we can be proud to hand down to our children.
How does ARC envision its role in making this positive cultural change permenent?
Our strategy to establish institutions parallel to those dominated by the modernists has the virtue of leaving us with no need to depend on them for anything. While one might have expected this to be a slow going process, we have found that we are moving faster by far than anyone could have predicted 5 short years ago. We know from thousands of related experiences and stories reported to us over the last five years, that trying to change things from within the established system is a waste of time. We have discovered the hard way that "skill-challenged" faculty members at every college and university in the country stand in the way of allowing any Living Master or well trained artist to be hired to teach, and intentionally prevent any system of training that actually works from being employed. Due in part to the Internet, we have in these last few years gone from 14 tiny known atelier schools with a total of 110 students, to today in which there are 64 ARC Approved Atelier and Academy schools in the world with over 2,000 students in training. The student bodies are growing fast ... with new schools opening every few months. We have also learned that most of the talented young people who want to go into the fine arts, have in mind classical realism when they want to learn how to draw, paint or sculpt. These students are soon disillusioned when such skills are ridiculed in "art schools" and "art departments" everywhere except in the 64 ARC Approved® schools. As a result, many of the potentially most talented art students in the past 80 years were negatively impacted and wound up choosing other fields of endeavor, while the students who had the "find-a-gimmick-to-make-a-mint" mentality were the ones graduating with degrees in art. ARC has thrown the bright light of truth on these institutions, and their degrees are being given the "third degree". Now finally, the truly talented are readily finding the best available instruction here through our resources at the Art Renewal Center® website.
A progressive, trained, and rapidly developing alternate art world, resulting from preferences built on humanist themes, which is what people really want from art, will fill our future with great artistic achievements. A live ARC Salon, hopefully traveling from New York to Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, London, and other major capitols around the world, will show the public what realism can acheive in a contemporary world. We need to continue to develop a more formal structure of educators, scholars, art historians and experts, who will continue to write and approve publications, conferences, and eventually create a highly developed system of affiliated galleries, museums, collectors, foundations, and patrons. Movements of this scale don't just materialize overnight, but the human need and the needs of a civilized, advanced and sophisticated society to have "real" art with which to communicate and express ideas, beliefs, values, and what it means to be human, is the only way to ensure our growth to prominence and to ensure our success. For ARC's success is no less than representative of the success of humanity itself in achieving a civilization predicated on caring, empathy, and a sensitivity to our fellow man.
So I would like to extend my sincere congratulations to the winners of this year's competition and my thanks to those who entered and all those who helped administer the ARC Salon, for their participation in this fundamental change in the art world and the real world.