Will You Sign This Petition ?

O.K -- perhaps it's a bit long-winded -- but everyone at the Palette and Chisel should consider joining Sue Lyon and Scott Burdick in signing the petition created by Miles Mathis regarding the National Portrait Competiton run by the National Portrait Gallery.

Here's the first paragraph:

We, the undersigned, have attached our names to this letter in order to protest the appropriation of the National Portrait Competition by a narrow political faction. This portrait competition is sponsored by the trust of the late Virginia Outwin Boochever. Ms. Outwin Boochever underwrote this prize because she loved figurative drawings, paintings and sculpture. From the earliest stages of planning for this prize, it was clear that her intention was to encourage art by the old definition: art as beauty, as subtlety, as depth, as direct emotion, as skill, as craft. She did not desire nor foresee that this prize would become another medal on the breast of the avant garde. She did not intend to subsidize further research into Theory or socio-politics, she did not intend to subsidize divisiveness or activism, nor did she intend to encourage victimhood and the culture of complaint.

If the members of the P&C won't stand up for aesthetic value in portraiture -- well --- who will ?

(By the way -- this cause is not restricted to political conservatives -- and, like myself, Mr. Mathis is something of a tree-hugging, bleeding-heart liberal. But effective advertising is one thing -- while great painting is something else.)