The Real Snake: Proceedings of The Representational Art Conference 2012

The Real Snake is a fascinating record of many of the presentations that were made by academics and artists at The Representational Art Conference in the fall of 2012, a groundbreaking event founded by artists Michael Pearce and Michael Lynn Adams, who recognized that there had been a neglect of critical appreciation of representational art well out of proportion to its quality and significance. Filling a gap in the study of contemporary art, the conference was planned as a focused but non-doctrinaire event, of serious academic standards.

Essential reading for people who love traditional studio art and want to know more about what’s happening in the representational art world, The Real Snake is packed with fascinating contributions, including critical insight from Jed Perl and the entertaining commentary of popular Californian artist John Nava, who gives the title to the volume with his reference to a scene in the movie Bladerunner. Other engaging chapters include eloquent compositions by the popular blogger John Seed, the legendary Los Angeles artist Ruth Weisberg and technical wizard Virgil Elliott.

CONTENTS

Michael Pearce
Preface

Jed Perl
Re-imagining Representation

Ruth Weisberg
The Possibilities of Post-Post-Modernism

Stephen Knudsen
Is Representational Painting Ready to Take on Metamodernism Without Clichés? The Painting of Bo Bartlett

Justin Kunz
World, Story and Meaning in Contemporary Representational Art

Liu Nan
Painting and Drawing Instruction in Higher Education in the United States: An Historical Overview of Trends from 1776 until 2006

Gingher Leyendecker
The Effects of Technical and Conceptual Teaching Methodologies on Student Outcomes in Life Drawing

Saskia Ozols Eubanks
The Dialectics of Impropriety: Realism, Classicism and a Feminist Voice

Kay Kane
The Restoration of Venus: The Nude, Beauty and Modernist Misogyny

John Seed
Anne Harris, Kyle Staver and Janice Nowinski: Three Approaches to Beauty

Patrick Connors
Antecedents in Contemporary Pictorial Imagery: Thomas Eakins’s Paintings and Photography in Perspective

Zoe Bray
Anthropology / Ethnography and Naturalist / Realist Painting: Parallels in Ways of Seeing and Understanding the World

Claire Nettleton
Postmodern Poodles and Electric Sows: Contemporary Representations of Beauté Animale

Virgil Elliott
The Concept of Quality in Art: Inspirational and Practical Concerns

John Nava
Don’t Worry, Be Happy