Nick Long | In the Real World

“There are things out there that people just don’t bother to look at that have a certain kind of beauty,” says Nick Long, his smiling eyes glistening behind his glasses. In his acrylic canvases and “graphite paintings” (Long’s term for his detailed pencil drawings), he likes to expose the sublime in everyday, accidental compositions.

Long’s Thompson Station home teems with found objects from nature carefully dispersed among an impressive collection of prints and pottery. He believes that artists should support each other and has become an avid collector of works by his peers.

When looking at one of Long’s originals it is hard to believe that he is not a full-time artist. He still maintains a day job as a designer and spends late nights and weekends carefully toiling away in an upstairs studio at his home. Many in Long’s position might view the hours spent in the office as a stumbling block to an artistic calling, but he credits his thirty-eight years in the design industry with providing him the perspective that he needs for his fine-arts endeavors.

Long employs the knowledge of form, organization, and detail that he has learned through years in advertising and product branding to generate dynamic arrangements in his paintings. He knows how to guide a customer’s eye through a design using subtle visual cues. In the same way, he directs his viewer’s gaze on a course of subtle lines, shapes, and harmonies to the focal points of his paintings. “It has almost become intuitive as far as the compositions go…. There is just so much personal pleasure in being able to manipulate the world around a form and make it real.”

Long was always attracted to art. His mother wrote poetry, and his father was an amateur photographer. “As a child, I really enjoyed the smell of crayons a lot,” he says, as a smile lights up his face. Attracted since adolescence to realism as a stylistic approach, Long enrolled at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1968. In the late sixties, abstract expressionism was followed dogmatically by faculty at many campuses, and Long’s realism could not find a comfortable home in many ways. He chose design as a major “because you make decisions at that age based on what you can make a living at.”

Long took five years of drawing and painting courses at UT but on graduating left his life as an artist behind. The year was 1972. He did not pick up his pencil and brush as a painter again until the early 1990s. It was then that he began a graphite study using his wife, Jerry, as a model. He describes the drawing in excited tones: “It was an epiphany moment, a seminal moment. It was like learning to see all over again.”

Long’s artistic rebirth has come about through trial-and-error experiments and a healthy dose of good instinct. His eye for layout and design helps him to see interesting arrangements in unexpected places. He spends vacations or weekend drives with camera in hand, hoping to snap a shot worthy of a tribute in graphite or paint. He calls his works “silent collaborations,” because he finds the beauty in chance objects assembled by nature or unsuspecting people around him.

“I look for interesting compositions, beautifully lit compositions. I will add contrast—I’ll alter an image to create that dynamic. I look for something like a beautiful fluid shape juxtaposed against a square.”

Long has won national awards for his art but is little known in his native Tennessee—a fact that he hopes to change. It is his dream to devote more and more time to his graphite and acrylic works. His paintings and drawings take months to complete, requiring hundreds of hours to achieve a meticulous level of detail.

Easily mistaken for photographs, Long’s paintings are organized on a giant grid andperfected inch by inch in a full scale of values. Long often uses graphite dust that he applies with cotton balls and Q-tips to achieve the finest nuances of shadow. His acrylic paintings are each executed on watercolor paper. With small, intentional brushstrokes, Long pores over each image with the devotion of a medieval monk. “I’m a little stubborn because I’m a purist. I’m not showing you my hand at all. That’s why I do hot press paper, because it is so smooth. Anything that is in that painting is there because I’ve done it.”

When asked about his philosophy as an artist, Long answers simply, with his characteristic friendly smile. “It’s more of a lifestyle than a philosophy. It’s all I’ve known. It’s all I do. I just like to make art.”

www.nicklongart.com

by Deborah Walden  |  photography by Anthony Scarlati