Richard Long Was in Born

Richard Long was in born in Bristol, England on June 2, 1945 (Spector pp). From 1962 to 1965 he studied at West of England College of Art, and by 1964, he was making Earthworks and experimenting with the idea of Impermanence, "a theme that would inform his work throughout his career" (Spector pp). Long studied under Anthony Caro and Phillip King at the St. Martin's School of Art in London from 1966 to 1968, and in 1967, he introduced walking as an art form, followed by his first solo exhibition in 1968 (Spector pp).

Says Long, started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making sculpture by walking. Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary long-distance walkers" (Long pp). Walking is in Long's blood, his parents met at a ramblers' club and his earliest childhood memories are linked with outdoor pursuits (Gayford pp).

Long says, "My father used to take us down to see the spring tides...I grew up playing on the tow-path" (Gayford pp). Long and his father often went "youth-hostelling and hitch-hiking together" and to this day walking is a compulsion (Gayford pp). Long recalls that he was always an artist, always drawing and painting, and his parents let him draw all over his bedroom walls (Gayford pp).

And when he was five years old, the headmistress of his school made a deal with him that if he came early, he could have his own easel and paint through the morning service on his own (Gayford pp). After 1969, Long created environmental works all over the world, documenting his walks with texts, maps, and photographs, and as he began to exhibit more frequently, "he was forced to confront the relationship between his walking and the presentation of his work in a gallery" (Spector pp).

At the Dwan Gallery in New York, he walked a spiral on the floor with boots muddied from the soil of England (Spector pp). In the 1980's, "Long began making new types of mud works using handprints applied directly to the wall...he also constructed large lines and circles of stones, slate, and sticks, often collected on his walks, or, in later years, from locations near the exhibition sites" (Spector pp).

To create his art, Long walks hundreds of miles for days and weeks at a time, often through uncultivated areas, from the countryside of England, Ireland, and Scotland, to the mountains of Nepal and Japan, and the plains of Africa, Mexico, and Bolivia (Spector pp). Long documents his journeys with photographs, maps and lists of descriptive terms which are exhibited as individual works (Spector pp).

Unlike other artists who manipulate the landscape to create Earthworks, Long does not alter the terrain by digging or constructing, he simply adjusts the placement of rocks and wood to subtly demarcate geometric shapes (Spector pp). Long's 1980 "Red Slate Circle," is 336 inches in diameter and consists of 474 stones from a New York quarry, and when it is installed in the Guggeheim's rotunda, "the monumental ring echoes the building's unique spiral while conjuring images of vast canyons, still lakes, and stone pathways leading into the distance" (Spector pp).

Long's 1987 "Vermont Georgia South Carolina Wyoming Circle," 291 inches in diameter, consists of white, red, grey, and green stones (Vermont pp). He uses color as an interval stop (Hackett pp). "Slate Atlantic," 2002, is 10 X 5 meters, is constructed with slate in a half-moon shape on a green field (New pp). His.