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Last Autumn I visited one of my favourite galleries, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, to see a visiting exhibition of contemporary British artists from the Tate Modern. One exhibit in particular caught my attention, a painting by Richard Long. The reason was fairly obvious: it incorporated a written poem. Born in 1945 in Bristol, where he still lives, Long’s work is often described as ‘Land Art’, a movement of which Andy Goldsworthy is, perhaps, the best-known exponent. Ever since his days as an art student, Long has studied landscape, mainly by walking -usually in straight lines. Like Goldsworthy, he often re-arranges or makes subtle alterations to natural locations and objects and these are generally recorded photographically [e.g. A Walking and Running Circle, Maharashtra, India, 2003, being much enjoyed by local children].

Richard Long sometimes makes a written record of his walks to be incorporated in his paintings. His Stoke exhibit was one such: ‘Two Straight Twelve Mile Walks on Dartmoor 1980’ has text overlaid on a typical low-key, ‘natural-coloured’ landscape. His ‘two walks’ were conducted along parallel paths, a quarter of a mile apart [ie. 24 miles] and completed in one day! The text is, likewise, in two columns, the left stating place names on his journey and the right giving a briefly noted comment about each:

                   East Dart River     Into a Low Sun
                   River Swincombe      Across Stepping Stones
                   Yealm Head              Full Moon Rising

In an interesting interview given by Long to Mark Kidel [Resurgence No 227, Nov/Dec 2004], he comes across as a very private person, quietly confident in his vision and his talent. He is no mystic [his straight walks are not ley lines] but is clearly in intuitive communion with nature. As a man with a strong artistic focus he can appear a little eccentric, as in his insistence in having some ‘bloody good’ Bristol Avon mud transported to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, the local product not being up to the mark.

‘Long is obviously restless, and driven to keep walking, finding depth in movement rather than stillness,’ concludes Kidel, but, in sharp contrast to the jet-setters of the commercial world: ‘It is a human-scale encounter, in terms of space and time, with nature and the elements.’ I would suggest there is much for us poets to reflect on in Richard Long’s work [and, if I’m honest, I can see a workshop in the offing]. 

John Alcock