Irvin Rodriguez paints and draws the human figure, successfully combining a traditional realist approach akin to Spanish Baroque on his figures with a more contemporary looseness towards abstraction on the background settings. His method and process serve as a vehicle to explore the figure, nature, art history, race, and identity.

Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, Rodriguez is a first-generation bilingual American from Dominican descent. Growing up in the inner city—a cement jungle of concrete buildings, stone facades, and fire escapes—Rodriguez recalls a bleak and oppressive sense of low expectations. Art became his escape; it gave him a sense of purpose, carried him through life and drove him to study fine art.

The Representational Art Conference, a California Lutheran University Arts Initiative event organized by Michael Pearce, is a yearly international event focused on forward-looking representational art in the 21st century. This year’s TRAC—held between March 31st through April 4th, 2019—took place at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Ventura Beach, California, gathering a large number of attendees hailing from North America and as far away as Europe, South America, Asia, and Oceania.

Artists, writers, poets, philosophers, filmmakers, scientists, curators, and other creative minds gathered to exchange ideas, present papers, attend lectures, hold demonstrations, participate in panel discussions, socialize, forge friendships and alliances, and exchange ideas on all sorts of art-related subjects. This year’s topic was Imagination and 21st-Century Representational Art. While TRAC provides an exciting platform for debate, it does not seek to establish a single monolithic aesthetic for representational art but instead tries to identify commonalities in an effort to understand the unique potentials of representational art, ideally shedding some light on possible future directions.