Jeremy Long: Paintings and Drawings
Jeremy Long’s most recent show, Paintings and Drawings, is on view from October 29-November 23. Like his last show in 2021, the work focuses on the family in the interior spaces of his home, with iterations of the home life theme in different rooms, different subsets of family members, and through investigating the relationships between the characters through different levels of abstraction. In the latest show, he ventures further into abstraction, where some pieces feel like an exploration on the psychological dynamics of the household, and at other times, like a deep meditation on the soul of each individual character.
I communicated with Jeremy about his work and his influences. He shared, “I have been thinking about Paul Klee, who is concerned with involving the reality or unreality of images/ paintings in which representation questions representation. One of the things about Klee is that in his notebooks, The Thinking Eye, you can see him minting different pictorial ideas that are different forms of abstraction. Each is a pictorial idea within which he works rhapsodically to find a specific form which reveals the poetry with the completion and fulfillment of the forms. Each painting has to be complete and fulfill itself, an effort to make every subject reducible to a simple sentence.” And for Klee, this meditation on abstraction is in part an effort to understand the subject not merely as what we see with our eyes alone, but what we understand through our emotions. His famous quote, “One eye sees, the other eye feels,” speaks to that dialectic between outward representation, which is commonly understood as reality, and the more soulful, psychological reality that is not so much visible as it is felt.
If each painting is a rhapsody, then in Jeremy Long’s latest show he has written and conducted an entire fugue. (If you do not know what a fugue is, think about Walt Disney’s original Fantasia. The first piece they explore is Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, one of the most famous pieces of music of all time.) The structure of a fugue is divided into three parts: exposition, development, and recapitulation. In the exposition, the overarching theme or themes are introduced. In the development, the themes are iterated and reiterated, with each one modulating the key, tempo and constructing new counterpoints. The development is not meandering, but rather a thorough development of the theme, as if to leave no stone unturned in understanding the relationships in the phrases of each episodic statement. Finally, the piece closes with the recapitulation, which is the conclusion of the piece, and where the theme is restated in its original key, with perhaps some additional harmonic phrasing that it learned through the journey in its development.
Exploring Long’s work as a fugue, we might begin with the surface understanding of the largest painting in the show, The Concert. In this painting, Long paints his own family in the modern-day Norman-Rockwellian, quintessential family scene: two parents dropping everything to watch their two younger daughters play a violin-cello duet, while the older son marches upstairs, skipping stairs as he goes, finding relief in being temporarily ignored. The house is in a state of livable chaos, with every horizontal surface covered with the remnants of this day’s routines: a laundry hamper next to a music stand, a watering pitcher and blanket seated on a bench to the left of the cellist, a random flannel shirt, book, and a square shiny vessel, sitting next to the one piece of equipment for the impromptu house concert–an analogue metronome, actively swinging to keep time. The mother, dressed as if she is attending an actual orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall, is centered under the arched doorway, like a Madonna, peering around the violinist to examine the cellist. Then there’s Long, crouched down on the bottom step, his hand resting on one of his recent paintings, partially covered and leaning against the family dog. He stares at some distant spot on the floor as he listens to the music. In the background, several of Long’s latest paintings are hanging on the walls, and a pair of Converse sneakers dangle from the hinge of the cello case. Such is life: a moment in time, a representation of the daily life of his family.
The Concert, oil on canvas, 2024, 72×96 inches
In The Concert, the apparent relationships between the family members are established. But from here, the development phase begins, and the show takes a turn. Meditations on each of the younger musician-children, Practice and Lila and her Cello, each portray the focus and commitment to their instruments. The classic owl metronome dictates the tempo with the sweeping arcs back and forth of his bowtie, and the daughter diligently and conscientiously obeys his command, staring down at her sheet music, methodically playing each note within his structure. Circles are swept in time, and her arm rubs the bow perpendicularly across the strings. The arc of her head and hair mimic the arched doorway in the larger painting, and the simplified forms of the objects provide balance across the painting, from top to bottom and left to right.
Practice, oil on canvas, 2023, 24×18 inches
Conversely, Lila and Her Cello portrays the middle child soulfully playing her cello not so much as a study or practice, but as a musician who has something to say. The perspective is from below, with the light also coming up from below, creating a much more rhapsodic feel to this variation of the theme. The relationship between the physical forms of the elder daughter and the cello is much more physically integrated, with the push and pull of forms across the body and instrument contradicting each other, playing with the proportions of the anatomy and with this, Long is constructing a singular Lila-cello being. Even the metronome is subsumed into the plane of the tapping leg. The bright purple tone around her bob haircut reverberates as she stares off in trance while she plays soulfully and expressively.
Lila and Her Cello, oil on canvas, 2023, 24×18 inches.
Where The Concert showcases the focus and adoration of the parents on their children, Violin Lesson’s iteration on the theme reveals another dimension of the life of a parent. A Klee-like gradation of browns and greys fill the silhouettes of the violinist, which seems to be representing the sounds heard from the other room, such as the repetition that is required in practice: playing, and then playing again, challenging phrases in order to some day perform them without stepping out of tempo or hitting the wrong strings. In this scene, the parents have subordinated themselves to the needs of their musical child, receding to other areas of the home to make room for that lesson to take place. Long is quietly tending to kitchen chores, while his wife is leaning on a counter, exhausted, with her head in her hand. We see them each occupying their own dimensions of space, respecting each other’s alone time during this regular routine.
Violin Lesson, oil on canvas, 48×60 inches, 2023
The most abstracted version of the theme is portrayed in Study, where the composition of The Concert is reprised and made more formally geometric. The central arch references the arch of the doorway, the head and hair of the younger daughter in Practice, and also the S-shape cutouts of the violin and cello. The warm golden tones of the opposing sides of the central arch coil to wrap around the perimeter of the rectangular picture plane and cooperate with the borders of the dark shapes on the top of the picture to create a container that continues to hold together this family unit, despite the different foci of the individual parts. In this iteration, Long shares the spiritual interconnectedness of a modern family as it fluctuates in and out of versions of togetherness, engaging with each other both directly and in parallel play, unabashedly harmoniously.
Study, oil on canvas, 18.5×14 inches, 2023
To carry the metaphor fully, the full recapitulation is in returning to The Concert once more. Meditating on the other pieces in the show, including many that are not mentioned in this blog, the geometric shapes and structure of the painting become much more overt. The curve that extends from the hair of the violinist, down through the arm, continues to the edge of the cloth that is draped over what we now see as the painting The Practice. Bodies and objects are working collaboratively to carve out spaces that adhere to a very strong, abstract geometric foundation that reckons the The Study. The intensity in the cellist’s face, the conscientiousness of the violinist, the tender admiration of the parents, and the outward focus of the eldest’s gaze, all reemphasize the interconnectedness of the cohesive whole, each belonging, each in their individual stages of their lives.
The Concert, oil on canvas, 2024, 72 × 96 inches
This beautiful show is on view from October 29 until November 23, with an opening on October 31 and an artist reception on November 2.
