Latest good news for the Rob Gutteridge School of Classical Realism!
The Rob Gutteridge School of Classical Realism (RGCR) has been accepted as an ARC Approved school by the Art Renewal Centre. This is historic. It is the first, and currently the only art school in Australia, to achieve the status of an ARC Approved School. The Art Renewal Centre is the foremost international entity for researching and vetting art schools that teach skill-based training techniques in the visual arts.
To see the RGCR listing on the ARC website the link is: http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/atelier.php?atelierid=148
I would like to thank my students for their dedication and hard work in 2016, resulting in such beautiful and skilful drawings, which supported my application for ARC Approval. This news is their celebration as much as mine, and means they are doing work that is as good as can be found in any atelier anywhere in the world. It is just the beginning. The RGCR has only been in operation for 7 short months and a lot has been achieved. My heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in RGCR.
Go to the ARC website to see what the RGCR is now part of. Here is an excerpt from their information for those who are new to ARC:
The Art Renewal Center is the foremost entity for researching and vetting art schools that teach skill-based training techniques in the visual arts. For those interested in acquiring strong technical skills in the visual arts, ARC Approval™ holds more weight than college or university accreditation, where for the vast majority, technical drawing, painting, and sculpting skills are not the priority. ARC is known for keeping the highest standards in art education, only approving those schools who teach solid, skill-based training methods, which increase visual literacy. The schools ARC endorses have instructors who have heavily trained in these methods and are able to produce high quality works of their own, thereby having the qualifications necessary to instruct others on how to create works of art with fully rendered and accurately depicted realistic imagery. The type of concentrated technical training the Art Renewal Center promotes first developed in the late middle ages/ early renaissance and was used as the primary form of studio art education throughout Europe and later, America. It was used all the way through the 19th century into the early 20th century before it died out almost completely with the inception of purely conceptual art. This type of training originally started as apprenticeships, and developed into guilds, small schools known as ateliers, and eventually large national schools during the 18th and 19th centuries, and was the type of training that almost all of the most famous old master and 19th century artists would have had, which is what enabled them to create accurate realistic imagery, shadow, and form, including anatomy and the human figure. This was the method learned by artists such as Michelangelo, Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt, all the way through to Sargent, Bouguereau, Gerome, Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Il’ia Repin, Ivan Aivazovsky, and even by artists such as Monet, Degas and Van Gogh.