Although the Art Renewal Center (ARC) is best known for promoting contemporary realism through competitions like the ARC Salon, which will be hosted by Sotheby’s New York this July, as well as the global community of artists working in the genre, the importance of historical fine art has always been central to the organization. When ARC launched their website in 2000, a year after the nonprofit was founded, they presented it as the first online museum dedicated to the work of 19th-century artists and the Old Masters, and had a database of 15,000 images. Today, ARC’s historical online museum includes over 89,000 artworks and hundreds of scanned historical letters from artists.
Chung-Wei Chien, Venice Symphony. Watercolor on paper, 29½ x 21½ in.
“In 2004 when we introduced the ARC Salon Competition, we viewed this as an extension of these principles,” says Kara Ross, ARC co-founder, co-chair and chief operating officer. “Representational painters of today are returning to traditional values of beauty, balance, skill, poetic compositions and the core of what historic fine art has always been, a way of visually communicating our shared humanity in a recognizable way which does not need written explanation. From the earliest beginnings of humanity, our species had an innate desire to depict the world around them and express what it is to be human through realistic imagery. The Art Renewal Center promotes the idea that realism captures the contemporary way of life and is both self-explanatory and timeless—the same values that historic American art has.”
Jana Büttner, Burden. Bronze, 13¾ x 11¾ in.
Jim McVicker, Fall Morning, Wildlife Refuge. Oil on linen, 30 x 48 in.
The largest competition in the world for contemporary representational art, the 16th International ARC Salon Exhibition, will feature 95 works selected from over 5,400 entries representing 75 countries. The artworks are divided among categories that include figurative, portraiture, imaginative realism, drawing, landscape, still life, plein air, from life, sculpture, animals and a special category for teens.
American Fine Art Magazine and its sister publications are proud sponsors of the ARC Salon and bestowed a unique award to the artist whose work best demonstrated the influence of the masters of yesteryear. This year’s winner was Chung-Wei Chien for Venice Symphony, pictured here, which brings to mind one of James McNeill Whistler’s depictions of a similar scene. In reviewing the thousands of salon submissions, we came across quite a few works by artists who are clearly utilizing the techniques and approach of Old Masters and historic artists of the American Gilded Age, some examples of which are featured here.
John McCartin, Carnations With Cherub. Oil on Belgian linen, 19½ x 29½ in.
“These artists are continuing the great legacy of human achievement in the visual arts. In all other subjects, whether it be engineering, mathematics, the culinary arts, novelists, etc., humanity learned from generation to generation,” says Ross. “People studied the accomplishments of those who came before them and then tried their best to build on them, to hone the skills, to further advance them and to continue them into the present. This is how we have always grown and thrived as a species. If we forget the past, forget the lifelong efforts of our ancestors in the visual arts, all we get is splattered paint, blank canvases, or equivalents. Although this happened in the visual arts, there are thousands of artists out there now who have had enough of deconstruction. They want to start building again. They respect our ancestor’s accomplishments and are creating new masterpieces with the skills and dedication needed to create timeless expressions of our shared humanity.”
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