Why Realism? by Frederick Ross - Part 9

Prestige suggestion causes people to assume automatically that a work must be great if it is by any of the "big names" of modern art, so they at once start looking for greatness. If they don't see greatness they are made to believe that it is due to their ignorance or lack of artistic sensibilities, but never because, just maybe, there is some failing in the art work. To acknowledge doubt is to make oneself vulnerable to ridicule and derision. It's so much easier to go along to get along. Students operating under that kind of intimidating pressure, you can be sure, will find greatness no matter what they are looking at. The reverse of this has been trained into them when they view academic paintings. They have been taught that works exhibiting realistic rendering are "bad" art and therefore any good that is seen is not due to qualities in the artistic accomplishment, but are rather due to a lack of intelligence and taste in the viewer.

So many students and even teachers have written and told us how realism has been virtually or actually banned from their art departments. John Stuart Mill's remarks on this very issue, (the tendency to not debate, confront or to completely ignore differing views), are as alive and pertinent today as they were two hundred years ago.

Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable. And

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth. however John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty (From Great Political Thinkers by Wm. Bernstien p.569)

Without a dynamic living coterie of experts teaching traditional techniques in drawing and painting, it will never be possible for college art departments to have students who are able to enrich the debate and the academic environment for all students by producing works of art that are capable of expressing complex and subtle ideas. To forbid these skills to be taught on campus in any real depth, is as ridiculous as having a music department that refuses to teach the circle of fifths or only teaches three or four notes from which they insist all music must be composed.

If there was nothing to be ashamed in their teaching methods and in their results, they would welcome the chance to confront the ideas that they should be well equipped to refute. They have a solemn duty to maintain the integrity of thought made possible by what has been handed down to them by those artists, writers and thinkers of the 19th century and before, who established a system where freedom of thought would prevail. And where is it more important to vouchsafe these principles than at our nation's colleges and universities who are training the next generation of leaders? Even if they don't agree they have a duty to expose their students to responsible opposing views.

I never dreamed I would get to see the recreation of a system that produced so many great artists, but it's happening right now and the yearly ARC Salon competition, started in 2003, has grown year after year. It is now administered by my daughter Kara Ross, ARC's Managing Director of whom I could not be more proud. In less than three years it has more than doubled its number of participants and this year we have nearly 2,200 entries. Every year the winners are being picked up by galleries and many of them are establishing successful careers.

Nelson Shanks was one of ARC's first Living Masters and is arguably the greatest portrait painter of the past 75 years. He is being honored tomorrow, here, and I can think of no one else more deserving of this award. I wish him and his family my best wishes and the gratitude of the realist art world for his leadership and dedication to the discipline of painting.

I want to ask each and every one of you to enter the ARC Salon each year and apply to become an ARC recognized Living Artist or Master. Only when the best artists in the world compete nearly every year will the Salon once again take on the importance so long held by the Paris Salons. Each year, seeing each other's work and sharing technical and aesthetic knowledge, creates a cross-pollination that challenges and insures ever-greater art competitions. We are actually already seeing this happen. In the past few years I can finally say that the best artists today are within striking distance of painting masterpieces at the highest levels of art history. Some are already doing it and I invite you all to view last year's results and the years before that. The current ARC Salon deadline just past us on January 31st and probably in April the results will be posted online and the next ARC catalog produced thereafter. We welcome your participation, and comments. I thank each and every one of you for the part you are playing in a new Renaissance of Realism.

In fact, I would say that we are really just beginning to explore the great themes about the human condition, whether subtle or evident, whether psychic, or psychological...literal or literary...fiction or fact; whether of inner life, or interstellar travel. The last century has unquestionably been the most complicated and expansive to the human mind and human sensibilities, and the tenets of modernism which have held the art world in an iron grip have been absolutely paralyzing to the discipline of painting and the fine arts. All of the breakthroughs in thought and science that have occurred in this century, have not been captured with traditional realism; a century during which the knowledge of the world went from doubling every 50 years to doubling every 6 years. If the math is right, 98+% of the world's knowledge has been generated during the last hundred years. This entire past century has barely been touched at all by your chosen field. They say, "It's all been done"? My god, you'd have to be living in Plato's cave to believe that. We have hardly begun to even consider all of the possible areas of thought, emotion, knowledge, and experience which have yet to be conceived, drawn and painted, in which the expressive, poetic and creative powers of the artist's eye can once again enrich society, culture and civilization with an outpouring of countless masterpieces from the hands of our Living Masters, either here today, or those who may now just be entering one of the 70+ ARC Approved schools.

With the power of the Internet and with credible organizations such as the network of associated societies of portrait artists, and the Art Renewal Center reaching countless millions of people; with the support now of six major art magazines all committed to reporting on the ARC yearly Salon winners and a vast growing array of other important developments in the realist art community which are reported on every week in ARC's blog and Weekly ARC Newsflash sent to tens of thousands of our members, we are well on our way to a new birth of creativity and a vast new outpouring of human expression; an explosive reinvigoration of the visual arts, but this time fully imbued with the true meaning of freedom of expression. So long as most of humanity is permitted to compare and decide for themselves what constitutes great art, and with poetry, truth and beauty as guiding lights, a full rebirth of the universal language of traditional contemporary realism is assured.