Painter and professor Jeremy Long's alert eyes, set in his serious face, reveal his many years of experience in painting. Yet, his expression, as he discusses color relationships, landscapes, foregrounds, spaces, rhythms and "oneness," conveys the depth of his devotion to the study of art and his desire to learn and create. "I believe whole-heartedly that you don't really see or understand a painting unless you take the time to try and draw from it-that sort of mechanical thing of looking at it while transcribing it allows you to see things that are completely unexpected," said Long. However, even for someone with his talents, the process of attempting to achieve the goal of truly seeing his paintings took time and effort to learn. Almost twenty years since the start of his artistic journey, he has yet to master this. Long graced the Assumption College art community with his presence on Thursday, February 24 to present his art, and to introduce works from his latest group exhibition, Painters Painting, located in the Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. The Chicago native, having served as a visiting professor to Assumption College in 2007, is currently working as an assistant professor at Ithaca College. Having received a degree from the Kansas City Institute in 1989 and attending the Chautauqua School of Art for four summers afterwards, Long graduated with a MFA from American University in Washington, D.C. in 2001.
However, Long credits his creative beginnings to his experiences at a "unique high school" called the Chicago Academy for the Arts. Five days a week, for three to four hours a day, Long was exposed to artists, museums and creating projects in a city where such things were easily accessible. From there, Long recalls that, "One of the biggest sort of breakthroughs for me [in graduate school] was just trying to remember what it was specifically that got me interested in spending time alone in a studio and making things. And it came out of some early interests in drawing that I was doing when I was in high school."
The next hurdle of overcoming for enhancing his artistic expression was his sophomore year experience at Kansas City Art Institute. His art instructor, Wilbur Niewald, controlled everything from the type of paint, to the type of brushes, to the subject or landscape the students painted. Being so limited, all that was left for the artist, Long observed, was that, "You tried to make a painting that had everything to do with finding these color relationships and the fact that you ended up with a painting of [the subject] was a byproduct." Long went on to conclude that, "All this was done to manufacture an idea that had everything to do with learning how to see." Long also attributes his ability to "see" to his skill of recognizing color relationships and utilizing their technique.
Long soon developed an interest in cubism and was attracted to the idea of "engineering" or "inventing" his own images, his own collages of shapes and colors. "[Cubism] was something exciting, something that I really needed to go through and do," he said. "It was the language that I was interested in making the painting about." He delighted in finding a rhythm for the forms and figures and creating them from that energy.
Long wanted to discover more of himself and chose to try and learn about himself through his work. "I was trying to invent some forms and appropriate them in a way that would begin to tell me something more about myself and use unconventional sort of materials, for instance like spray paint, graphite, stencils, things like that." After a year, he began to feel as if he were repeating himself and realized that by looking at other subjects, he continued to learn more about who he was.
Continuing to paint outside and inside still lives, Jeremy Long began to consider a "notion of oneness" in his paintings. One technique that helped him achieve "oneness" in his drawings was the idea of a "foreground." Long described this concept, saying, "Its really about questioning the reality of the painting in the way its painted. That's to say the whole thing behind it could very well be another painting or it can bend back into a space that is there." Another technique he found useful was "false attachments," which were objects in the paintings itself that seemed to be directly touching each other, but in actuality were separate.
"And then I started to get interested in this idea of putting together a big kind of demonstration painting," Long explained. "A painting that was talking about my own kind of real allegory and where I was at." These creations turned out to be displayed in Painters Painting. In these, Long conveyed the many surfaces and depths of his struggle with his family-life. He depicted his wife and son often, whom he adores and has strong relationships with.
This is unlike the one he struggles to establish with his parents. After 23 years, Long decided to reach out to his father; but what was described as a "strange event" in which his father paid attention to him for the first time, was actually "horrible" for his wife who suffered anxiety attacks as a result. His mother also suffers from bi-polar disorder, something Long says he, "should've known was happening." Besides depicting these experiences, he explored the different roles of himself, his wife, and his son, as he continued to create paintings.
One audience member of Long's lecture, noted that, "Every time I see those paintings, there's something very sad about them to me-the figures, even though they're in this shared space-really are unaware of each other in a strange way, really isolated." After Long had concurred, saying that this was a good interpretation, Professor Edith Read, from the Arts department at Assumption College countered, saying, "When I heard you talk about your work, you talk a lot about the connections. so when I look at the figures I see the connection as being the composition. The negative space is the connection."
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