Jeffrey Long
Abandoned Books

About the Item

effrey Long, the elder son of a commercial graphic artist at Time & Life, was born in New York City in 1948. In 1970 Long received a BFA in Illustration and Art Education from Rhode Island School of Design and had decided to be a painter. His paintings from this period were photo realistic portraits and figures set in landscapes. On graduation, he married and began teaching art in a Rhode Island public school system. From 1971 through 1973 he was a resident artist at the Rockefeller-funded Pulpit Rock Community in Woodstock, Connecticut. Works from this intensive period were representational, highly dynamic, and borrowed from the vocabulary of cartoons. In early 1974 Long moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he obtained a full scholarship at California College of Arts & Crafts (now California College of Arts). There he received an MFA in painting in 1976. He established various studios in Oakland and Emeryville, while also working as a Curatorial Assistant at The Oakland Museum. The museum brought him in touch with such California artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Jay de Feo, Mel Ramos, Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. In 1977 Long was approached by an heiress of HC Johnson Company, important patron of contemporary art. This patronage allowed Long to work full time in the studio, and funded extensive travel in Asia, where introductions were made to important artists in several countries. Long’s large format gouache on paper works from this period show the flattened space of Japanese wood block prints. In 1979 he showed these works in New Image/Bay Area, curated by George Neubert at The Oakland Museum. The same year, Long started a decade long relationship with Ivory Kimpton Gallery in San Francisco, where he staged annual solo exhibitions. At the end of 1979 he established a San Francisco studio. In gouache, then large scale oil pastel on paper and oil on canvas, Long’s landscapes were a synthesis of places experienced, rather than directly transcribed. The artist was attempting to convey the essential energy of nature in increasingly totemic and energized paintings. Many of these large scale works are now in museums throughout the United States Including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Oakland Museum, Crocker Museum, Sacramento, and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. During these years Long was resident artist at the MacDowell Colony, Dorland Mountain Colony and Sacatar Foundation. Beginning in 1988, Long traveled regularly to many of the remotest parts of Africa, where he digested color and texture later to be employed in his abstract landscapes. Moving gradually in the 1990s to a more geometric, collage-layered approach, Long’s project was to bring metaphor and oblique narrative to abstraction. Reflecting on the votive offerings of gold leaf on the interior walls of Buddhist temples he had seen in Thailand, he incorporated this element into his collaged surfaces. The idea of the votive offering became a vehicle for the artist to visually address the AIDS crisis, which was killing so many of his friends. Many of the paintings portrayed light emerging from darkness. Others were chronologies listing names of the dead. Landscape was never far from the surface of these abstractions. But these were fragmented, gridded landscapes evoking a fractured paradise. In 1998 Long, together with his partner, moved to New York for three years. The artist established a studio in TriBeCa. Here he continued oil and collage works based on abstracted landscape. On returning to San Francisco in 2001, he began to introduce biomorphic shapes into a matrix of rectilinear structures, ending up with a colorful, content-free kind of abstraction. In 2003, in acquiring a ranch in rural Lake County California as a part-time residence, Long’s contact with nature was reinforced. Evidence is seen in his abstract pieces based upon orchards. Meanwhile, Long’s solo shows continued apace at galleries such as Andrea Schwartz, Fay Gold, and Toomey Tourell. Although the artist has been chiefly known for his non-representational work, he often returns to figuration and more literal landscape. Artist Statement The human element in nature is a connecting thread in Jeffrey Long’s broad swathe of paintings done over the past five decades. His paintings, expressed in various visual languages, abstract, representational, figurative, narrative, and metaphorical, are meant to bring order to direct experience. Jeffrey Long’s paintings balance elements of Modernist design with traditions from tribal and Asian art. The “Mosaic” and “Moderne” paintings present boundless associations of color and shape in syncopation. The “Numbers” series brings together mid-Twentieth Century biomorphic design and collage. The warp and weft of weaving are referenced in the “Rip Rap”, “Orchard” and “Kaokoland” paintings. The “Shelters” series introduces representational aspects. Rooflines and architecture are integrated into geometric abstraction. Public Collections San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA The David Brower Center, Berkeley, CA Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI Mills College, Oakland, CA Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ Achenbach Foundation, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA DeSaisset Museum, University of Santa Clara, CA Stanford University, CA University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Racine Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, WI City of Hartford, CT City of San Jose, CA US Forest Service U.S. Embassy, Manila, Philippines Selected Corporate Collections Jeffery Long’s work has been acquired by more than 100 corporate collections. Mobil Vesti/Chevron Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe Genstar Capital Bank of Denver Bank of America World Headquarters Bank of San Francisco Financial Network Investment Corp. Hirsch-Bedner Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon Prudential Nordstrom Adobe Carleton London Cisco Sun Microsystems UCLA Neurogenetic Institute Charles River Associates Hilton Mandalay Bay Resort Cosmopolitan Hotel Fairmont Hotels TMG Partners Opus West

Creator:

Jeffrey Long

Dimensions:

Height: 36 in (91.44 cm)Width: 48 in (121.92 cm)Depth: 1.5 in (3.81 cm)

Medium:

Oil

Movement & Style:

American Modern

Period:

2010-

Condition:

Gallery Location: