11th Annual ARC Salon
ARC is pleased to present the winners and finalists of the 11th International ARC Salon Competition with an approximate 2,500 entries this year by over 1,050 artists. This year we have included 789 finalist works. These works represent the top 31% of works submitted. For the first time many of the works from the ARC Salon will be exhibited in a live traveling exhibition that will start at the MEAM museum in Barcelona, Spain, where it will be on view from November 17th till December 28th to celebrate an intense collaboration between Europe and America for representational art. The ARC Salon 's works will be mounted at the same time the MEAM mounts its 8th Figurativas Painting and Sculpture Competition. The MEAM competition is organized by the Foundation of the Art and the Artists, which is, along with the ARC Salon, the other most important competition for representational art in the Western world in which more than 2,300 artists from more than 90 countries participate. The 8th Figurativas Painting and Sculpture Competition, Figurativas 2015, will run between November 17th and January 10th. The Official Awards Ceremony of ARC Salon and Figurativas 2015 winners will take place as one tremendous event on November 20th, 2015 at 19:00 hours at the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona and a Forum of American and European representational artists will take place the following day on Saturday the 21st. Works for this exhibit are still being selected, though the MEAM Purchase award and the ARC Purchase awards shown below will all be included. The ARC Salon portion of the show will then travel to New York City, where it will hang at the Salmagundi Club from January 18th to February 4th. Regular updates will be given on the exiting upcoming live exhibition including information on the additional works to be included as they are added to the list of exhibiting works. We are developing a special page for this that will be accessible from the ARC homepage in the next few days and will track the progress of the selection process.
Due to the large number of entries, this year the International ARC Salon had eight judges divided among the seven categories, four judges per category. To see a full list of the judges and which categories each adjudicated, please click here.
This year we have given out 10 purchase awards, the value of the paintings totaling over $160,000. This is in addition to the $47,000+ in cash prizes and the production of the Streamline Art Video Award, which went to master artist, Cesar Santos, valued at $25,000. This award is a fully produced and released DVD by Streamline Art Video, an ARC Allied Organization™, and it will showcase the artist's technique with a demonstration of their work and an interview with the artist. To pre-order this DVD now at the special pre-order price, click here.
This year Best in Show went to Arantzazu Martinez for her painting of Absolute Trust - Sleeping Beauty. This ambitious work, measuring 90½ x 51 inches, captures grace and tremendous movement even though the subject is fast asleep. Martinez is not unknown to the ARC Salon, winning the Bouguereau Award just two years ago and First Place Figurative in 2007. The Bouguereau Award winner, Nicholas O'Leary's painting of Departing Bodies, was also ranked highly among the judges. This atmospheric painting with hundreds of bodies utilizes a successful compositional complexity similar to
There was one Dual Category award winner which went to a work ranked highly in more then one category. This was the case of Forgone Kings by Allen Williams, as it was ranked highly in both the Drawing Category and the Imaginative Realist Category.
Rehs Contemporary Galleries, Inc., New York City, NY selected 15 finalists who submitted additional images for the possibility of being represented in an exhibition and sale at their gallery. Out of the ARC finalists 6 were selected for this exhibition and sale. Richard Hall, Philippe Attie, Kari Tirrell, Duffy Sheridan, Joseph McGurl, and Walter Rane will have a group show at Rehs Contemporary Galleries in the Spring of 2016. More information will be available on this in the weeks and months to come.
When Hope Comes by Daniel Gerhartz won both the American Art Collector Magazine Award of Excellence award as well as First Place in the Imaginative Realist Category. Since the Judges for these two awards were completely separate, it says a lot about the strength of this particular symbolic work.
This year the Plein Air Magazine Award went to Alexandra Tyng for her landscape, Light Pathway. This work won her a featured article done on her work in an upcoming issue of Plein Air Magazine. This award was chosen by the magazine's editor M. Stephen Doherty.
Peter Trippi, the editor for Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, gave the The Fine Art Connoisseur Award to Dean Mitchell for his watercolor of The Artist Bob Ragland. Mitchell won an article in an upcoming issue of Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine.
We had three additional magazines participating in the ARC Salon. Western Art Collector Magazine, American Fine Art Magazine, and International Artist Magazine. All three of these awards were picked by the magazines' editor Joshua Rose. The Western Art Collector Magazine Award of Excellence went to John Buxton for his landscape titled The Uninvited and the International Artist Magazine Award of Excellence went to a figurative entry, Campbell, by Hiroshi Furuyoshi. Both of these awards are a featured article in the respective magazines as is the American Art Collector Magazine Award of Excellence, mentioned above. The American Fine Art Magazine Award of Excellence was given to Joseph McGurl for his Thunderstorm over the Midwest From a Plane Window.
The Lessons in Classical Painting Publication award was given to five works: Erica's Sky by Qing He, Fujitive by Tadashi Kashiwada, Self Portrait at 62 by Jim McVicker, After the Party by Steven Levin, and Mr. John Downs Esquire by Frank Ordaz. All are expected to be published in Juliette Aristides' latest publication, Lessons in Classical Painting, due out in May 2016. Aristides is well known for her instructional books on atelier style painting and drawing which all quickly became best sellers. The books are featured in some of the world 's best museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London and the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam among others.
The $5,000 prize for the Knohl Collection Award for History or Literature Inspired Art was equally divided between two works: Know Not Thy Pending Fate by Christina Grace Mastrangelo and The Ship of Fools by Carl Dobsky. This award was sponsored by Dr. Howard and Linda Knohl who are among the world's most respected private art collectors and have amassed a stunning assemblage of hundreds of paintings and thousands of decorative art objects. When asked about the historical or literary content of their work, the artists had insightful answers. Mastrangelo replied that, "It evolved after years of studying humanist literature, and the personal effect of love and loss through death and heartbreak. When I first moved to Florence in 2006, I was struck by the intensity of the history of the city. It lead me to study the great minds of Florentine history: I read about Michelangelo's struggles with his work and with God; I read about Leonardo's ideas and inventions and discovered the great minds of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and Dante. After living there only a short time, the idea for this work came to me in a dream. The scene was a group of figures stretching up into the sky, away from darkness and pain, and up into the light, towards serenity, harmony and connectedness. It was only later that I made the connection to Dante's Divine Comedy, as the vision changed to include the unknown realm of the afterlife and an internal search for an answer." For The Ship of Fools Dobsky said that "The theme for the work has been around for a long time with some crediting it as beginning in the time of Plato. It kind of comes into it's own in the 15th century with a book by Sebastian Brant titled The Ship of Fools which became the inspiration for works by the likes of
Look to the future weeks and months for full coverage of the ARC Salon Winners in The Epoch Times, Huffington Post, and Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, as well as the featured articles on the specific winners in Plein Air Magazine, American Art Collector Magazine, Western Art Collector Magazine, International Artist Magazine and perhaps in other venues as well. The ARC Salon continues to grow every year with greater and more diversified publicity and a continual increase in the number of artists entering. We are approaching the start of our 12th annual ARC Salon Competition, scheduled for 2015/2016. For this upcoming Salon we will be introducing a new, eighth category, dedicated to Portraiture. This is sure to be our largest competition yet with the largest cash awards and the most publicity to date. Placing as a top winner will certainly give an artist his or her big break in the field. We will be accepting entries from March 1, 2016. If you are an artist, don't miss out on your chance to compete.