The Spirit and the Flesh: Contemporary American Realists

Ben Long’s artistic career began with an early inspiration from his grandfather and necessitated a long search for kindred spirits among his contemporaries in America and Europe. From this struggle he has emerged as an artist who has absorbed the precepts of the old masters and now champions the humanist ideal expressed through the depiction of the figure.

Long notes “The human form has always been the most profound subject of expression for the artist, and the nude, a symbol of beauty.” Yet Long eschews moralistic content or intentional stylistic reference in his work, preferring to leave the figures in his paintings open to a multiplicity of interpretation.

Long grew up with his grandfather, who had studied with George Bridgman (1864-1943) at the Art Students League. He recalls drawing the human figure as far back as he can remember, and notes that the importance of the underlying structure of the body, how it worked and moved, was stressed to him early in life.

After searching for a mentor while still in his teens, and studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Long went to New York City to see if the Art Students League still existed. There he finally found formal instruction from Frank Mason and Robert Beverly Hale, but remained unsatisfied with the lack of dialogue between the students. It was, he states with charming frankness, “a pretty dry well back in those days.”

In 1967, Long went to Vietnam as an infantry officer and eventually became head of the combat art team. Upon his return in 1970, he went to Italy and apprenticed with Pietro Annigoni in Florence, until 1979. Long notes that Annigoni was a brilliant draughtsman, and while Long admits a love for the Venetian painters, it was drawing that he found intoxicating.

Long’s intention, however, was not merely to recreate the classical style of academic drawing, with its rigid technical prescriptions and inherent social message. His aim, as he has often stated, is to focus on the human figure. In his drawings, oils, and frescoes, Long creates spatial tension between his figures and their surroundings. The most successful paintings of the old masters, “were always the ones that pulled you into the picture,” he said recently, “and these portraits still live and breathe three and four hundred years later.” The portrait, of course, avoids the pitfall of narration, and Long’s work, too, aims to avoid the suggestion of a particular style or technique of any one era.

Long chooses his figures for their humanity and their evocative power. Yet the inherent irony that suffuses his work is that the nude, while eternal, also represents, as Long writes, “all that is mortal and ephemeral."