The Art Renewal Center has just “upgraded” my status from Associate Living Master (ARCALM) to Living Master (ARCLM). I am deeply honored and appreciative that an organization of such international importance recognizes my work to be of high quality. View art and bio HERE.
Requirements for Living Master status are as follows:
The artist has dedicated themselves to becoming a realist artist with the wish to express our shared humanity through the visual arts. In addition, an ARC Living Master™ has mastered all of the building blocks of great art as defined in the ARC Artist™ description, creating fully professional works of art, as well as some identifiable masterpieces. Beyond that, they have successfully created a body of work which demonstrates accomplished facility in their craft that compares to the masters of prior centuries. Their work demonstrates strong, reliable, poetic sensibilities which intertwine great universal subjects, powerful original compositions and mastery over all aspects of the craft, working seamlessly to enhance the chosen subject. They repeatedly are able to “suspend disbelief” in the viewer eliciting empathy which is rooted in our shared humanity.
ARC has a well considered important mission statement:
1 – To promote a return of skill-based training, standards and excellence in the visual arts. The rich artistic heritage of 2,500 years of accumulated knowledge in creating traditional, realistic images touching upon universal and timeless themes.
2 – To promote visual literacy in public and private school classrooms and to the public at large.
3 – To unite the realist art movement into a synergistic community of like-minded organizations and individuals.
4 – To provide responsible views opposing those of the Modernist art establishment when warranted, especially as expressed in aesthetic philosophy and to rebut the idea that development in art requires destruction of boundaries and standards or pointless emphasis on ‘newness’.
5 – To advance the understanding that great art begins with great themes, expressing them poetically through mastery of all aspects of technique.
6 – To provide a forum for dialogue and exchange of expert information among educators, scholars, curators, collectors and artists.
7 – To promote scholarship and research on the artists of the past and the rediscovery and preservation of their techniques and methods.
8 – To create the largest reference database on the Internet for realistic art, including an on-line museum with thousands of high quality images of works by the greatest painters and sculptors in human history, alongside an encyclopedic online art reference library of historical texts, essays, biographies and articles, providing a technical and historical resource for artistic information.
