The Brooklyn Rail

Francesco Clemente

For Jim Long,

Some artists have careers, others have lives. Some artists have ambitions, the ambition of others is to have none. The sensibility of some artists is confined to the making of things. Others embrace their sensibility in everything they do. Some artists believe in excess, others in austerity.

Jim Long believed in austerity, and in living the life of an artist. The circular calligraphic skies he painted from time to time were eloquent not for what they said but for what they left unsaid.

At times Jim Long played the tabla, the circular shape of the Indian instrument an echo of the circular shape of his paintings, punctuated, like music, by rhythmic swarms of marks. There was no color, yet, when he painted, first the distressed walls of my studio, then the fresco-like walls of my home, Jim proved to possess an unfailing sense of texture, color and tone. The severity of Jim’s lifestyle, the sparseness of his work did not mean he did not know how to laugh. We were friends for forty years and for forty years we laughed at human folly and at our own particular version of that folly. Jim and I navigated along the ever-changing perceptions of art-making like planets on equidistant orbits. What Jim Long did not say was as tangible as what he could have said. I never broke his reserve, I never felt I should. I named him “The captain of the ship,” the ship being the sum total of technical and practical problems generated by my aging home and my very experimental painting studio. Jim Long solutions were always elegant and concise. He faced a long illness with the same elegance and economy. Farewell dearest Jim and forgive me for attempting to define your endeavor and the mystery of your smile and of your silences.

New York, 2024

Joyce Kozloff

I knew Jim Long socially earlier—but in this century, we worked together, with many others, on political protests. Jim was in his element! Harriet once said that if there were a march or demonstration anywhere, Jim would be there.

During the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq, early 2003, we formed Artists Against the War. Millions of people around the world were protesting as the armies amassed. We knew that in addition to the massive threat to human life, there would be destruction of the memory and history embedded in this ancient culture, the “cradle of civilization.” Our first action, “Drawn In,” was held at the Met in NY, and museums in six other cities in the US and abroad. Artists and students were invited to come to the ancient Middle Eastern rooms at their museums on Moratorium Day, March 5, with pencils and paper, and to quietly draw the art.

In fact, the criminal pillaging and destruction of archaeological sites, libraries and museums was far greater than anyone anticipated, even though art historians, archaeologists and museum curators advised our government to observe the Hague Convention on Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. On May 17, we called a second action, a solemn vigil, at the same locations: “Erase In”. Ironically, there was a blockbuster show at the Met, “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium BC from the Mediterranean to the Indus.” We drew in that exhibition, and every 2 hours, formed a circle and erased our drawings, dramatizing the erasure of cultural history. Jim was central to this project, researching the illegal donations by prominent collectors of stolen art to the Met, long before illicit trafficking was widely known. He even produced a small brochure of his discoveries!

Many years later, Jim and I were again members of a large group, “We Make America,” formed the week that Trump was elected President, November, 2016. We saw ourselves as a visual arm of the larger resistance movement. We made props, posters and banners, using humor and lots of color! We were mostly women, but that never fazed Jim. He was always helpful, with his carpentry and construction skills, figuring out how to make things from people’s ideas. Sometimes it was hard to realize our crazy ideas, but he liked the challenge: how to make the Trump Pinocchio puppets jump up and down on their sticks for a Tax Day protest; how to construct Pussy Gate so that a row of people could carry it for hours during a Women’s March; how to employ a shredder on top of a ladder to shred the Bill of Rights at Grand Central Station during rush hour. There was never a #MeToo or mansplaining moment, working with Jim, and we all loved him!

Lucy Freeman Sandler

Jim Long became a friend through a chain of circumstances: first my husband Irving Sandler, who was teaching art history at Purchase College, met the artist Harriet Shorr who was also teaching there, and became friendly with her; then Harriet introduced Irving to Jim, her partner at the time, and subsequently husband, and in the sociable way that Irving, Harriet, and Jim all had, they began to include me in the group. At first, for me, this was just on a social level, enjoying dinners—Jim and Harriet were great cooks—and hearing a lot of art talk, which was a privilege for an outsider to the world of art practice. Of course, when we met at Jim and Harriet’s loft, before anything else you saw their paintings. This was my introduction to Jim’s work. He didn’t talk much about the underlying concepts, although I think I recall the term “fractals,” but I was moved by the visual beauty of those complex graphic patterns that never seemed to repeat themselves, and I was so grateful when Jim gave a beautiful circular painting to Irving and me. And then there were those wonderful Christmas cards that I think many of his and Harriet’s friends treasure.

Now Jim didn’t have an easy time of it; he had repeated bouts of serious illness, which he was loathe to discuss, and Harriet became increasingly incapacitated. For about six years Jim was her devoted caretaker. We toss around the word “saintly,” but truly that’s how I would describe Jim. In the last couple of years of Irving’s life Jim would accompany Irving on gallery rounds almost every Saturday; certainly they both enjoyed talking about what they saw, but Jim made sure that Irving got up and down stairs safely. He was really sensitive to other people’s life situations, and helped quietly, not just Irving, but others too. In the same way, after Irving died Jim would come to visit me on an occasional Saturday; we would drink a beer together, or maybe have some wine, and then in an act of supreme generosity Jim started to take me around galleries every few weeks; I would ask him to pick three shows to see. It was a fascinating experience to see art with Jim; he wouldn’t say much, and of course during the last year or so he lost his physical voice. He had this way of getting very close to the work, to figure out its facture, and then to study each work intently from a distance. It was a lesson for me in slow looking. I rarely went to Jim’s studio, but one time he showed me a whole series of paintings in which he used every possible shade of yellow; I found the intensity of his own pictorial experiments remarkable and I loved the work. At the end Jim was doing linoleum prints. He gave me several, so I have tangible memorials of his hand and mind, and many vivid and cherished memories.

Rackstraw Downes

Jim Long has made four consummate and monumental paintings and titled them "For Jagannatha," after the Hindu god. In these works, the normally conspicuous stamp of human decision making appears to be absent, and art making resembles a protracted natural process, like the formation of stalactites on the ceiling of a cave.

In For Jagannatha, Jim’s process creates colonies of matter made up of tiny warm dark branchings, lying on a blonde surface of natural cotton duck and dispersing towards a proto-circular periphery. In their slight but bewilderingly endless internal variations these colonies image a society held together not by laws, hierarchies or leaders but by an invisibly affiliated consistency of substance. Jim maps them on the most singular of geometric areas—only one directional decision determines the periphery of a tondo—and the one to which they most nearly, and almost, correspond. But they behave organically; like garden vegetables in rows, or versals on backgrounds in illuminated manuscripts, they spill over the tondo's confines and offset its inflexibility. At their boundaries, where the dispersing energy appears to conclude, they mass more densely in an act—so it seems—not of territoriality but of self-defining completion; to the viewer they say with satisfaction: “Now I am whole.”

Izzy Barber

Jim Long taught me so much by simply existing in the world as he was.

In a chaotic world that demands a certain level of compromise and conformity, Jim somehow made it seem possible to remain true to one’s convictions and move through the bedlam without dulling one’s life and humanity. To know Jim was to be aware of possibilities of how to interact with the world as an artist and as a human.

I was twenty-one when I started working as a painting assistant to Francesco Clemente and I was trying my best to seem like I knew what I was doing, while having very little clue. Jim Long, I was told, was the guy to call when you needed someone who really knew things. There was evidence of Jim’s handiwork throughout Clemente’s studio and home. Everything he touched was both aesthetically striking yet unobtrusive, simple in a way that only someone with a deep knowledge and appreciation of materials and a focused attention could achieve.

And then I met Jim.

A lanky guy decades older than me with a boyish face, a worn-out denim jacket and an antiwar pin. He had a wry playfulness, an ease about him, and a serious work ethic. From the start he caught me off guard, immediately treating me as an equal. I wonder if he was aware of the impact he had on me. To be taken seriously as a twenty-one-year-old female artist fresh out of school felt like a rare and generous act- and an invitation to join him at his level. This extended to art as well. Soon I was visiting his loft, seeing that everything he touched, whether a plastered wall or paint on canvas, was full of this meditative attention and care.

It’s an inescapable fact that the world, and especially NYC, is always in flux. Wealth and commerce were closing in on Mercer Street, but Jim and Harriet’s loft remained firmly theirs; it remained human. The surrounding buildings and residents got richer, slicker, professional and capitalism did its thing. But walking into the loft, I could feel that real lives were embedded in the space. Handmade fixes along with a lifetime of paintings by Jim and Harriet, commingling, evidence of two lives running parallel and coexisting together in one home.

The last photo I have from the loft shows Jim’s painting leaning against the wall on wooden blocks, with Harriet’s painting hanging parallel on the wall. It’s one of Jim’s handmade stretchers, a kind of truncated semicircle with the top sloping down to the right. On the surface are painted organic fractal patterns that feel both large and small at the same time. To me it reminds me of a boat that contains the storm of the sea, containing something that is outside of its confines. Or, seen next to Harriet’s yellow painting of a willow branch and its meandering offshoots and shadows, I feel the current of electricity, wind, natural forces. That frequency that, like the wind, travels through them both. And so does this intensity of attention turned outward, connecting to the world and taking seriously the act of looking.

I will remember Jim for how he moved through the world, fluidly and resolutely on his own terms.

Rosie Lopeman

I’m sitting here, looking at Jim Long’s woodcut print “Pilot,” an Artist’s Proof from 2020, onto which he inscribed “For Rosie,” and gave to me for Christmas that year. It is printed on that 45g Japanese Mulberry paper from Blick, which at some point I’d gone out and bought for him, as instructed, with a list of questions I was to ask the Blick employees on his behalf, which I now forget but were all unexpected, slightly suspicious and very practical about the material. The print is so alive. It is, I suppose, just one black shape printed on the raw paper, but very intricate. The black growths, their gestures, their reaches, all grow into the space, nearing each other, activating the negative space between them. The quality of the shape does remind me of Jim: it presents itself simply, connects me directly to nature, and also to a rich history of human craft and creation, though I can’t pin down from where or when, the references seem to just keep moving backward through time. The forms appear fragile yet powerful, like new roots shooting out into soil—like a birth: un-undoable.

I first met Jim in 2018. My friend Izzy Barber had given him my name to help with Harriet’s archive. I photographed and catalogued all of Harriet’s 35mm slides, her cabinet of still life objects, and her journals and sketchbooks. I was and still am in awe of her work. Jim and I talked about it often. Eventually, I went on to help Jim with his own studio work, and also the work he did for other artists: painting and plastering projects in the neighborhood.

This may sound sentimental but it was really true: the moment I saw Jim, I liked him instantly. Sometimes you just know it by the face. Within a few minutes of beginning our first day of work, we found ourselves in bouts of unexpected laughter as we encountered his outdated computer operating system and its circular—“fascist,” in his words—customer service.

One August day in 2019 Jim took me to an artist’s place nearby, where he was doing some repairs. Outside the front door was a five foot streak of white paint, spilled and dried on the sidewalk, visually marring the entrance to the home. Jim had packed a handful of scraping tools, as well as a hat to protect me from the sun, and asked me if I thought I could remove the dried paint. We talked it over, he gave me advice, and left me to it. I got down as close as I could to the concrete, meticulously removing the white paint off of each tiny peak. It was a beautiful world down there. I loved being so close and focused on something no one else could see: the miniature landscape of concrete: browns, grays, taupes and whites. At one point it started dramatically thundering and pouring rain. Jim checked on me, but I wanted to continue working through it. Minutes later the sun shone again, warming and drying everything. When I’d finally lifted off all the paint, we shared in the enthusiasm. We beheld what was left: a kind of ghost stain, slightly lighter than the rest of the sidewalk. Jim thought for a while, and then pulled out a bag of old dyes and paints: ivory black, burnt sienna, yellow ochre and others, and together we mixed a color, like a potion, adding in some soil from a nearby plant, tweaking the warms and cools until we’d matched the natural hue of the rest of the block. I carefully painted with it until the stain was more or less invisible. It was such painterly and generous work. I learned so much about attending to the small, to a simple form that could open up endless worlds and spaces, and about doing something so thoroughly for someone else’s sake, to an extent no one would ever ask for.

Sometimes the world feels so clamorous and showy and I think of Jim, who was like an antidote to all that. It was nourishing, being in his loft inside the warmth of handmade walls and little stools, the life lived for art, both his and Harriet’s, the flowers (a pair of cropped white carnations from Trader Joes in a ceramic cup), the books (William Nicholson, Barnett Newman, Malevich)—and the newspaper on the floor, reused for years to absorb leaks from the faulty ceiling (a 2003 fold of the Brooklyn Rail with an illustration of a Richard Pousette-Dart ink drawing) which, based on the date, had possibly been on the studio floor for twenty years, the paper crisped and wavy.

I was held by that space, fed by the atmosphere of it. Deeply calmed by it. Gently inspired. It wasn’t a burning, urgent inspiration that Jim imparted. It was much more a steady, earthy, long-game, “fuck expectations,” just trust yourself, focus, be serious about it and tune out the dreck, sort of gift.

I’m incredibly lucky to have known Jim. He was always so considerate, so generous and reasonable. And we really did laugh a lot together. Having attended a small memorial at his loft this past May, I know how similarly treasured he was by many others.

Maury Colton

Jimmy!

That is how I remember Jim. I always felt that we were like early teenagers from the same New England neighborhood gang. There were adults around us, but we had our secrets that they would never know.

We met at a fellow artist’s loft in Soho in 1981. I had just moved from Maine to New York and I was deep into soaking up the energy of what was the remnants of that community of early Soho settlers.

So we met as artists first, and grew to respect each other for that dedication. We learned together the mechanics of making a living on construction sites and home remodels in the roaring 1980s. We shared many days together in the grind of earning but always joyous in the anticipation of getting to our studios to further the calling of our talents.

I thought of Jim as a type of monk in his dedication to the mystical realness of painting as the ultimate art of our culture. When it came to influences, I primarily thought of Jim’s respect for Barnett Newman, as a painter who chose either “this or that” in decision making, there was no middle ground.

Jim’s paintings had that same quality: accept or reject. This is a devotion. His high aspirations and dedication to rightness were evident in everything he pursued and accomplished. His paintings are a memorial to a life of perception, exploration, and the love of Art.

To those who had the good fortune to know Jim, we will always remember him well, his humor, and the realization that we are all fortunate to have been in his company.

Vincent Katz

Remembering Jim Long

I started hanging out with Jim and Harriet in about 1980. I was helping Jim on construction jobs in the summers. I loved spending time with Jim. He was always on our side, against the man! It was summer and got very hot during the day. Jim would come to work wearing short cutoffs and boots with a skimpy, well-worn t-shirt, carrying a six-pack. He’d bitch about the boss, a tweedy man who would turn up from time to time to see how things were going. Jim’s worst ire, however, was reserved for the architect. “Architects are a bunch of assholes!” he’d gripe. “They never know how anything gets done in the real world.” We’d look at their drawings then just do things the way Jim thought best. As the day wore on, and Jim was on his fourth or fifth beer, his sense of judgment could get a little slower, but he usually was very spot-on with decisions. I remember his gentle way of saying things like, “Hand me that little screwdriver.” All the tools were referred to in the diminutive.

Oftentimes, after work, we’d go back down to the loft on Mercer Street for dinner. It was there I got to know Jim’s partner, painter Harriet Shorr, and Harriet’s daughters, Ruth and Sasha. I loved the loft because it felt filled with living and family, and also with books and works of art. It felt well lived in. We’d have delicious dinners and talk about all kinds of things, especially books, but also music and art. I invited Sasha and her friends and Ruth to participate in a Super 8 film to accompany a song my band had recorded.

As time went by, I got to know Harriet’s and Jim’s work better, and later on, Jim’s writing. Jim’s works always surprised me by their gargantuan size and energy. Still later, I knew that he was working with Francesco Clemente, and I would often see them together. Jim was always more than the sum of his parts, and people knew that. We’d run into each other on the street and talk. We saw each other a little less.

I’ll always remember him looking out the window while we were working and singing the Rufus Thomas song, “Walking the Dog,” which was covered by the Stones a few months after Thomas released it. “Dylan never wrote any songs,” Jim said once. “Those are all old folk and blues songs he ripped off.” He had a funny smile on his face when he said it. Once, when it was my birthday, he gave me the massive tome, Capital, by Karl Marx. “I had to give you that one,” he said. Another time, knowing I was interested in ancient Greek poetry, he gave me a book on Greek bucolic poetry. Jim was always true to his roots.

–Vincent Katz, 23 May 2024