Jeff Long
"Fire Fly Gate" 72"x36"
Oil on Canvas
Jeff Long has been refining his art through a process of distillation. His paintings, which were inflected with a meditative and sensuous tone have now been pared down to essentials. Yet their power and beauty remain.
The change began when Long marked the turn of the new century by breaking with the past and redirecting his artistic career. After working in San Francisco for twenty-five years, he returned to his East-Coast roots and established a studio in New York City where he painted from 1998 to 2001.
Long said that he made the move "to get a little distance, to infuse a new note in my work - to add something vivid, of the present, of a more optimistic moment."
In his distinguished career, Long's body of work reflected his passion for exploration and took a broad sweep. It evolved from narrative realism, through a distilled figuration that drew upon Asian art, to works inflected with traces of Cubism, and eventually to a compelling form of abstraction that referenced traditions of votive offerings.
Relocation enabled Long to reconnect with his early influences.
In Manhattan they included the Museum of Natural History, MOMA, the Met, the Frick, the Flatiron Building, the old Mercantile Exchange. It also gave him the opportunity to revisit the dense woods, rolling fields and upriver ponds where he grew up.
Returning to New York was a way to assess the painter's progress in a new light; a time to test the elasticity and resilience of his approach to making paintings. It was a chance to see how the physical context of Manhattan would impact an artist whose paintings always mediated between imagination and the surrounding visible world.
Being in the East allowed Long to push his elegiac paintings of the mid 1990s (notably, his Prayer Wall series, which had as a subtext a sense of mortality sharpened by the ubiquity of AIDS) to a new, more formal blend of abstract elements.
The poet Neeli Cherkovski observed that in Long's paintings from the nineties, 'passages of light find their way through darkness.' Long, in his New York paintings, permits the light to expand, breaking up and softening the shadowy atmosphere. This freed the darker solids to drift into a geometrical order that is separated by swathes of territory bathed in luminosity.
