As we all know the deadline for entries into
Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantasy Art is coming up fast. I just got my entries off today. I am a huge fan of this publication, have been in it many times and think it is a showcase of some of the best artists of our generation. That said, there has developed an almost mythological quality to this annual. Artists rushing about frantically trying to get work finished before the deadline, sleeplessly going over what to submit, what to leave out, then waiting with bated breath to see if they got in. Careers have been made in Spectrum. At the same time there are artists who refuse to enter. They feel it is too political, too random to place that much credit upon a small group of subjective jurists.
Whatever side of the fence you fall on, this time of year always reminds me of Varnishing Day. Varnishing Day was the most important day in the artistic calendar of the Academic Salon artist. It was the last day that artists could make final alterations to their work before the Salon would open to the public and the judges would cast their ballots. The entire year for an artist came down to this one show! If you got in and won an award it would make your year in sales and commissions. If you won the Grand
Prix it would make your career! The better you did at the show the better your sales, the better your sales the more students you got in your workshops. The more students you got the better your print sales and the better you would do in the show next year, and around and around. This academic salon system became so ingrained in the culture that to be an artist you could not work outside the academies. Famous artists like Manet and Delacroix bristled at the Salon System, but tried to work within it. By the late 19
th Century the younger generation of artists had had enough of the politics and began to display their works in alternative shows.
In 1873 a group of Franco-Prussian War veterans and conscientious objectors who had fled to England returned to Paris and were refused entry into the Salon. Being a bunch of twenty-something post grads who didn't know any better they got together, rented some cheap space and put on their own show. That group included Pissaro, Monet and Degas among others. This group sardonically called themselves The Refused, but were ridiculed by the establishment as The Impressionists. (This could be likened to being called The Doodlers, today.)
This revolution of individual artist's freedom to work outside the academy and the academy's standards changes art forever. By the end of the 19
th Century the academic salon system had grown so big and political that it could not evolve with modernity, and like the dinosaur it was, went extinct. In 1893 one critic reviewing the art salon at the World
Columbian Exhibition in Chicago containing the works of such Victorian luminaries as
Bouguereau, Leighton and
Waterhouse remarked, "This exhibition has done more to set back the advancement of art than any event in the past twenty years."
In 1913 The New York Armory Show would seal the coffin on the Victorian Salon System and give way to the twentieth century modern Gallery System. An exhibition by artists and for artists. You can see by the poster left that the artists are referred to as "guests", this was a private invitational exhibit, not a state funded
juried show. Instead of paintings shoehorned together like a patchwork,"salon-style" each painting would be displayed by itself, "gallery-style". Instead of one huge institutional
juried show there would be hundreds of little independent private shows run by the artists themselves. Each small "ism" could find its own niche, and its own followers. These would become the model for today's successful trade shows like Comic Con and Illuxcon.
In the 21st Century this evolution has continued. The Gallery System is now under threat by artist-run websites. Today artists do not even need the galleries or publishing houses gathering millions of followers on-line circumventing the exclusivity of the galleries. Today there is a venue for any kind of art you can imagine and you can follow along directly with the artist. Whether this is a better system is arguable. A direct Democracy of Art where page views and followers equates to quality, or is there still a role for the
juried show in contemporary art? Check back in a hundred years and I'll tell you how it turned out.
So this week as you put the final touches of varnish on your painting for selection in the Spectrum Show lets all remember how far we've come, and where the future may take us!
Enjoy.
WOC
As millions dig out from the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, and begin to piece their world’s back together again, I am poignantly reminded of so many images that I’ve seen before. Gas lines, food hoarding, a breakdown of the social order as the infrastructure of society goes out overnight. As many heroic stories of first responders and life saving deeds are heralded, and the dark and awful stories of crime make it into the headlines, there are a million other stories, the stories of the day to day life that becomes the new Normal after a disaster.
In the post 9/11 culture the concept of the Post Apocalypse Story was reinvented because we had all just lived through a horrible disaster. Although 9/11 itself is rarely depicted metaphors for the sudden and horrific attack by an alien or outside force was dealt with in detail as the War on Terror was waged. 2005’s War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise depicted in stark reality the impact of the destruction of our society would have raising issues of survival and responsibility to one’s morality over one’s family. The award winning and critically acclaimed Battlestar Galactica which ran from 2004 until 2008 was another metaphor of all out war and destruction that placed the very fabric of society and morality into the crucible of the post apocalyptic world. 
The popularity of shows like The Walking Dead premiering in 2010 and McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, are poignant commentaries of how we all try to survive in a world where randomness
seems to be the only reliable constant in a culture where jobs, homes
and whole seaboards can be wiped out without warning. In the new post apocalyptic drama its not nuclear war or aliens
or even zombies that threaten our survival, but the creeping entropy of
chaos that lurches ever closer to those we love. In these stories we
are able to explore what kind of people we want to be, and what kind of
people we may become when the veneer of society is stripped away and
we are left with the abyss of the unknown looming ahead of us, left to decide what is important.
Steinheim Castle
New York Asylum for the Insane
Thomas Crane Public Library
In September 9 ad. the entire three legions of Caeser Augustus'
expeditionary force was wiped out by German Tribal Forces in what has come to be known as The Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Led by general Varus, 20,000 Roman legionnaires were slaughtered and never
found. It is recorded that til the end of his life Augustus would
wander the imperial palace muttering "Varus, where are my legions!" 
"The Abbey in the Oakwood"
There are so many excellent landscape painters in history, (Gainsborough, Turner, Rembrandt, Vermeer, et al.), but for me it is the Romantic overtones that makes Friedrich's work so powerful. These are not merely landscapes. In the tradition of other Romantic artists like Wordsworth, Keats and Beethoven, Friedrich's work does not extol the glory of the church, the greatness of his patrons or the virtuosic talent of the artist, he is illustrating the titanic power of nature and how minuscule we mere
mortals are when confronted by it. Lonely and destitute penitents move like wraiths between the tombstones in the shadows of a once glorious cathedral ravished by the supreme power of Time. The lattice of windows is mundane in comparison to the shapes of the tree branches. The mightiest ships of the greatest empires are crushed like toys in the ragged jaws of ice flows. The spires of a church pale in comparison to the Divine beauty of nature's own spires.
"Study of a Tree"
As we all know the deadline for entries into Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantasy Art is coming up fast. I just got my entries off today. I am a huge fan of this publication, have been in it many times and think it is a showcase of some of the best artists of our generation. That said, there has developed an almost mythological quality to this annual. Artists rushing about frantically trying to get work finished before the deadline, sleeplessly going over what to submit, what to leave out, then waiting with bated breath to see if they got in. Careers have been made in Spectrum. At the same time there are artists who refuse to enter. They feel it is too political, too random to place that much credit upon a small group of subjective jurists.
Whatever side of the fence you fall on, this time of year always reminds me of Varnishing Day. Varnishing Day was the most important day in the artistic calendar of the Academic Salon artist. It was the last day that artists could make final alterations to their work before the Salon would open to the public and the judges would cast their ballots. The entire year for an artist came down to this one show! If you got in and won an award it would make your year in sales and commissions. If you won the Grand Prix it would make your career! The better you did at the show the better your sales, the better your sales the more students you got in your workshops. The more students you got the better your print sales and the better you would do in the show next year, and around and around. This academic salon system became so ingrained in the culture that to be an artist you could not work outside the academies. Famous artists like Manet and Delacroix bristled at the Salon System, but tried to work within it. By the late 19th Century the younger generation of artists had had enough of the politics and began to display their works in alternative shows.
This revolution of individual artist's freedom to work outside the academy and the academy's standards changes art forever. By the end of the 19th Century the academic salon system had grown so big and political that it could not evolve with modernity, and like the dinosaur it was, went extinct. In 1893 one critic reviewing the art salon at the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago containing the works of such Victorian luminaries as Bouguereau, Leighton and Waterhouse remarked, "This exhibition has done more to set back the advancement of art than any event in the past twenty years."
In 1913 The New York Armory Show would seal the coffin on the Victorian Salon System and give way to the twentieth century modern Gallery System. An exhibition by artists and for artists. You can see by the poster left that the artists are referred to as "guests", this was a private invitational exhibit, not a state funded juried show. Instead of paintings shoehorned together like a patchwork,"salon-style" each painting would be displayed by itself, "gallery-style". Instead of one huge institutional juried show there would be hundreds of little independent private shows run by the artists themselves. Each small "ism" could find its own niche, and its own followers. These would become the model for today's successful trade shows like Comic Con and Illuxcon.
So this week as you put the final touches of varnish on your painting for selection in the Spectrum Show lets all remember how far we've come, and where the future may take us!