Richard Long...

'mood board of Richard Longs work'

Richard Long is a 69 year old artist who takes photos of different landscapes and creates his own 'track' lines to illustrate the journey of someone or something. A lot of his images are in black and white or very desaturated to create an eerie,absence to his work. He now works mostly with sculpture, but still creating the lines and tracks of people or animals to portray the journey or track of someone. Although he does create his photos by moving things around,he is guided by a great respect for nature and the formal structure of basic and simple shapes, which means he never makes significant alterations to the landscapes he passes through. He works with raw materials such as mud and rock to create the scene for his photographs and his sculptures.

 One of his most well known photographs was taken when he was 22, when he made a track of his own walking line. He walked up and down in a straight line in the grass, which left a track, he then photographed this track in black and white.

''First I started making work outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this led to the idea of making a sculpture by walking. This was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going 'nowhere'. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art. Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking – as art – provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. '' -Richard Long (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Long_(artist)

I have chosen Richard Long because his work is a more deliberate and obvious representation of track. It relates to my question of 'track' because it shows the visual side of track and the way we create tracks with natural objects and natural surroundings and landscapes. For my project I will incorporate the idea of not only just creating your own tracks but leaving your track or trail behind,to remember where you've been or creating a memory of the day or place.

Image Analysis:

In this image Long, just walked up and down in a straight line to create the track of his walking which he calls ''walking as art'' and this line of his walking tracks his journey. Long works in quite an organic way. He is at one with the landscape, perhaps this creative way of working is something I could experiment with in my own work. 

Objectively, in this image it's quite a symmetrical black and white image of a field with shadowed bushes in the background and a engraved line through the middle of the image, which separates each half of the field from one another. The black and white effect  makes the image look much older and more vintage and antique. It also creates a more haunted feel, with the feeling of absence due to the emptiness of the image,  and it not having any human presence in it. However the photo still has an openness to it due to the landscape of the image being flat and vast, despite the block of trees at the end of the line. This could symbolise the block and forced stop to his journey and could represent how his journey ended. The image is shadowed more towards the bushes and the end of line whilst at the start the image is fairly bright because of the effect of the line brightens the rest of the image slightly. 

My responses...

 

 

These are my first responses to Richard Longs work. I chose to follow the theme of leaving behind a track of your journey and keeping a record of where you've been and leaving your mark. I chose to use rocks and stones to portray this, by placing them in a line forming a trail from one place to another to symbolise the journey or track of someone. I also shot some of the images with my hand in the frame so that it shows someone leaving a track of where they've been and leaving behind their record of their journey. Furthermore the idea of leaving a trail of stones can also symbolise a way of not getting lost of the way back and this portrays the idea of tracking your journey. The element of adventure also comes into a journey in the way that you can always plan a journey however its the adventure that comes without planning and where their is no track and just leaving behind a trail to follow.

 

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail..."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

 

I then developed the idea of leaving behind your track further by experimenting with string, symbolising the way we leave a track as a way of remembering where we have been.