Artist Richard Long Finds Inspiration in Solitary Walks Through Remote Landscapes. Watch Him Make His Monumental Works Here

In our current era of social
distancing, Richard Long’s work feels oddly prescient. For over
half a century, the British conceptual artist has created art based
on his solitary experiences journeying through remote landscapes
from the West of England to Antarctica and
Mongolia. 

Back in 1967, while he was still
an art student in England, Long took a black-and-white photograph
of a path he left behind him in a field of grass, and titled
it A Line Made by
Walking. The simple
gesture and its image established that art could be a journey
composed of time, space, distance, and movement. 

Since then, the artist has
brought together these same conceptual elements with remnants of
the earth itself in works such as stone sculptures arranged in concentric paths,
and paintings made of mud smeared against walls by the artist’s
bare hands. 

“From a Rolling Stone to Now,”
Long’s first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in New York, opened
earlier this month, and is filled with sculptures, photographs, and
a site-specific mud painting. The title for the exhibition comes
from A Rolling
Stone (2001), a
photograph that depicts the marks made by a boulder as it rolled
down a snow slope covered in volcanic ash. Long took the photo
while on a 15-day walk in the Three Sisters Wilderness area of
Oregon. 

Running the length of the
gallery is a sculpture made of gray slate slabs sourced from
quarries in Virginia. The work acts as both a beginning and an end,
and represents the kind of work that is “one of the easiest things to make along a
wilderness walk,” as the artist has said.

“My inside and outside
sculptures are made in the same spirit,” Long has said. “The urban
and rural worlds are mutually dependent, and they have equal
significance in my work.”

To see the exhibition and Long at work, watch the video
below.

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The post Artist Richard Long Finds Inspiration in Solitary
Walks Through Remote Landscapes. Watch Him Make His Monumental
Works Here appeared first on artnet News.