I was about 16 (now I`m almost 20, oh how old!:) and I thought I was going to become involved in children`s cartoons which seemd like a fairly interesting thing at the time. I always loved art history and used to buy art books whenever I had some spare money. My favourite were the artists of the baroque. Then once I bought a book called Eroticism in Western Art by Edward Lucie-Smith (a little inappropriate for a kid that age?:) and while turning the pages for the first time one image smacked me right in the face. It was a bad reproduction, it was black & white, but it had MAGIC. It was Nymphs and Satyr. Next day I ran to the internet caffe and read everything I could find about the artist who created that masterpiece and saved many of the images for printing. About the same time I also got obsessed with Alma-Tadema who`s Expectations I saw in Encarta Encyclopedia... That was the way I stumbled upon ARC and realised that you can paint NORMAL pictures today and not be looked down upon. It all finally made sense! A world of beauty I never thought possible opened right in front of me. Then I found out more... about Lord Leighton, Gerome, Godward, Draper... and many of the artists working today in the style I thought was dead for over a century.
Now let`s get one thing str8 - I wasn`t COMPLETELY ignorant about the world of classical realism. I live in Vrsac, a town where the greatest Serbian classical realist painter Paul Jovanowich was born so you can bet I was mesmerized by his art from an early age. I just didn`t know it was "allowed" to paint that way in the present... It is TRAGIC how young people get brainwashed in pretty much the same way all over the planet.
Anway, back to the point I was trying to make - Nymphs and Satyr seems to be one painting that has changed more people`s lives than any other I know of... Stefan