Alphabe Thursday L is for Richard Long

It was when I read about Richard Long that I decided to look more closely at walkers and the reasons why they do it.  Richard Long (b. 1945) is an artist dedicated to walking as artistic medium. His early work called the Line made by walking of 1967 is a  black and white photograph showing a path in the grass across a meadow towards some trees on the far side.  Long had made the line with his foot steps.  Unlike other pieces of art, so called conventional,  Long’s work is not always appreciated directly art lovers.  The line made by walking is merely documented  in the photograph, with some text. Sometimes a map is used ; the route is marked,  the pencil traces his steps as he walks in a straight line, squares, circles or spirals.

In a similar way,his sculptures in the landscape are made by rearranging the local rocks and sticks into lines and circles; they are evocative geometrics that appear say nothing.

One such sculpture is the Line of the straight walk from the bottom to the top of Silbury Hill.  With boots dipped in mud he had walked the distance not in a straight line but a spiral on the gallery floor, the muddy path represented a route he had taken somewhere else.  

In some ways Richards Long’s works resemble travel writing, but rather than tell us what he felt, what he ate and other such details, his brief texts and uninhabited images leave most of the journey up to the viewer’s imagination.