Just a thought - figurative work seems to deal more with how the subject "interacts" with the setting, and less tightly cropped seems to be one of the determining criteria, although paintings always break the rules. Of the contemporaries, I'm thinking
Milt Kobayashi,
Dan McCaw, and of the realists,
Allan Banks,
Jeffry Mims,
Morgan Weistling,
Jeremy Lipking.
These paintings are all generally about the figure's relationship within the pictoral space.