Jeffery Jones is a full-time San Antonio realist who can properly be considered obsessed. With reality, 
that is. Not that artistic expression of all kinds is not appreciated, admired and collected by him; it is simply that painting things the way they 'actually are' instead of how he imagines them to be, is what consumes him.
Since he was a small child, stretched out on the floor drawing on scraps of paper while
his mom critiqued his work, he has wanted to record what he sees. It has been said that what differentiates man from other forms of life is his soul, understood by virtue of his keen intelligence. In other words, we are intellectually superior to all other earthly life forms, so highly evolved that we have a sense of ourselves that is not limited to the mere physical. Cogito ergo sum. That is absolutely true, but as he sees it, other things make us unique as well. One is the ability we have not just to see, but to recreate what we see in exquisite detail.
Representational
art has been back-roomed at major museums for most of this century, belittled
by many of the elite. While critical (and eventually public) acceptance
of movements like Impressionism and Expressionism were justifiably at the
forefront, realism took a back seat. Great realists like Norman Rockwell
were dismissed as mere 'illustrators' (a perjorative reserved for the most
heinous of violators!) and art school students were taught that representational works were, to be gracious here, less than
creative.
"But throughout, the public generally continued its love of realism. Western art, in particular, flourished, and if what we read today in some journals is true, major museum and gallery curators are beginning to believe that at least some of the hype over certain 20th century art movements has been overblown. One recent article even went so far as to call minimalism and abstract expressionism 'scams', stating that curators are beginning to dust off the great works of realism that have been languishing in their basement vaults."
Jeffery Jones, The Art of Realism
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