Artist's reception

Artist's reception was held for the artists in the "Caught in the Moment" art exhibit. Many positive comments were made including "The best show in Portland ever". The show is being held in the 611 building on North Tillamook in the Rose Quarter. Check out www.ga2c.org for more information.

Caught in the moment

Genre Art Advocacy Center

Caught In The Moment Exhibit of Figurative Realism scheduled to Start on December 10th.

The show will feature Sculpture and Paints by Alan Merris Bell, Semyon Bilmes, Daniel Bilmes, David Bollt, A. D. Cook, Jean-Marie Chapman, Wayne Chin, Martin Eichinger, Aimee Erickson, Eduardo Fernandez, Emily Gordon, Ken Grant, Joseph Highfill, Joanne Licardo, Bryce Cameron Liston, Lucong, Mike Magrath, Kris Parmele, Alexander Rokoff, Raphael Schnepf, Duffy Sheridan, Nate Snitzer, Heather Soderberg, Jon Swihart, John Van Dreal and John Vistaunet

Genre Art Advocacy Center

Genre Art Advocacy Center



The Film Local Color is a must see. The cast is excellent, the cinematography gorgeous, the music perfect and the story inspirational while driving home it's point. Congratulations are due everyone for an excellent production. I especially congratulate George Gallo for his script and direction. He has accomplished with this film what Artists should do with their art. Inspire, challenge, provoke and most importantly, bring beauty into our lives.

Theatrical Release Schedule

Realism — The New Modern

Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term also describes works of art which, in revealing a truth, may find the underling beauty in the mundane and nobility in the common.

Realism often refers to the artistic movement, which began in France in the 1850s. The popularity of realism grew with the introduction of photography - a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce things that look “objectively real”. Realists positioned themselves against romanticism, a genre dominating French literature and artwork in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. Undistorted by personal bias, Realism believed in the ideology of objective reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism. Truth and accuracy became the goals of many Realists.

The advent of the so-called impressionists, a term coined by art critic Louis Leroy in a satiric review published in Le Charivari, led to the eventual end of the state approved solon system. Oddly enough, the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school, the acknowledge predecessors of the Impressionist, contributed to both events.

New movements including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and eventually, abstract expressionism followed impressionism. Art seemed to capture critical attention by having a certain amount of shock value. The twentieth century was replete with art designed to shock, provoke or express a social or political ideology. The “shock of the new” had arrived.

Tom Wolfe summarized that history in his book The Painted Word: “In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs”. After providing examples of other techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe concluded with conceptual art: “…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. … Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory! Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision…late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple”.

Meanwhile, pushed into the shadows by the critics, the museums, and the art historians: in short the entire art establishment, a few voices pierced the fog with work so brilliant that it drew an immediate and brutal attack by the establishment.

Andrew Wyeth’s stark realistic tempera paintings of his Maine neighbors and their farms drew constant debridement from critics. Museum exhibitions of Wyeth’s paintings set attendance records, but many art critics were critical of his work. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the Village Voice, derided his paintings as “Formulaic stuff, not very effective even as illustrational ‘realism.’” Common criticisms were that Wyeth’s art verged on illustration and his rural subject matter to sentimental.

There were others quietly painting and sculpting in what had become, in art-speak, representational art.

In the process, almost every trace of the process and techniques of the old masters had been lost. No longer taught in the Universities, where a stack of old tires set to burning was presented as conceptual art, the apprentice/master Atelier system all but disappeared.

But some artists refused to allow the loss of such hard won knowledge. They taught themselves from old books, mixed their own paints and rediscovered techniques and mediums long abandoned by contemporary artists as retrograde and useless in “making” art.

Today, their perseverance and dedication to their craft lifted realism out of the shadows and into the light. Mammals were around long before the dinosaurs existed and were ready to take their rightful place when the behemoths finally became extinct. So it is with realism, the new modern.