Chairman's Message
The quality of the work in this year's ARC Salon is nothing short of sensational, showing a richness and diversity of styles and subject matter comparable to the heyday of the Paris Salons and Royal Academy Exhibitions in the late 19th century.
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 12th International ARC Salon. While humanity 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 human dreams, all of which are built from images of the real world, were called irrelevant and banished from fine art. 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.
Visual communication is what 21st Century realism is all about where every artwork and artist has something to say, being understood by people all over the earth. This is because Realism is a universal visual language whose value and importance enables people to communicate through their art regardless of which languages they speak and write.
The Realist Movement has 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, 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.