Chairman's Message
Without fail, each and every year that the ARC Salon has taken place, the quality, beauty and poetry of the works entered rise to ever-higher levels of achievement. The current ARC Salon is a testament to the character and nobility of the human spirit. The need to communicate through fine art is a distinguishing characteristic of our species, and despite a century of effort to suppress it, the need to communicate with creative visual imagery is exploding forth from the canvases and brushes of this new generation of 21st century artists, so well represented in this 2014-2015 ARC Salon, perhaps our finest competition yet.
While humanity has bolted forward in every field during the last 100 years, the art world was savaged and buried by a Modernist paradigm which deprived artists from developing and using any of the new tools and knowledge that the rest of the industrial world was using to forge ahead. Beyond that, they were also denied all of the advances in the arts that had taken place during the prior six centuries. Drawing, modeling, perspective, and all subject matter from the real world and even from the world of fantasy, fiction, religion and even human dreams, all of which are built from images of the real world, were taken away. Artists were told that they had to be "original" but were expected to do so without depending on any knowledge of the past, an idea that would be considered ridiculous in any other field. The art world was left behind while achievements in every other field grew at an accelerating pace.
As millions of people are, at last, seeing through the art-speak nonsense that spews from the apologists of Modernism, their writing and the works they describe are ready to be eternally stored in the Closet of Failed Pomposity next to the Emperor's New Clothes.
With the explosion of the Realist Movement, fine art has now risen from the ashes. There has been a great rebirth bringing back the chief goal of all fine art: the communication of our shared humanity; how we feel about life and living and how we experience the world; the entire range of what it means to be human and to do so with beauty, elegance, poetry and grace.
Now a new generation of artists have opened their eyes to the beauty all around us enabled to be more original than ever. The first decade of Realism's return, in the 21st century, focused on recapturing all of the tools and achievements of past centuries. We are half way into the second decade of this new century and artists are breaking new ground, carving out new ways of mixing media and commingling knowledge, developing new tools, and taking giant leaps. Now with 21st century subject matter and the advanced skills of atelier training, artists have the freedom to take greater creative risks, filled with enthusiasm, and finding their contemporary voices.
Visual communication is what 21st century realism is all about. Every art and artist has something to say which can be understood by people all over the earth despite hundreds of different languages and backgrounds. The objects and concepts derived from the real world, when creatively assembled by rich artistic minds, are capable of communicating the enormous range of human ideas, beliefs, concepts and emotions. It is also only through the art of Realism that we can convey to successive generations the value of hard work and discipline in the fine arts, and the full range of achievements that only such values can produce.