We’re looking forward to introducing you to John Long. Check out our conversation below.
John, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: When was the last time you felt true joy?
Hiking to Sky Pond in Rocky Mountain National Park.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My brand. So 21st Century.
At the turn of the Millennium I was invited to participate in a show titled “Mania” at Houston’s Art Car Museum along with 12 other artists. The show catalog characterized our “quixotic artistic quest” and described our work as “material, emotional, speculative, obsessive, sublime, divine, geometric, and abstract.” It added, “real art should bypass the Renaissance and return to a much earlier tradition of art dealing with forms and shapes dictated by ideas rather than by appearance.”
That’s pretty heady stuff, but it resonates with me. I live in a mountain town where there are many landscape painters. Some paint in a realistic style, others are more impressionistic. I admire their work, but that is not what I do. My paintings aim to express feelings that emerge from my unconscious or abstract expressions of ideas.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
Frame-shifting. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kabul, Afghanistan in the early 70’s. Before the wars. Before the Taliban. Before Americans knew where Afghanistan was located or anything else about it. It was my first experience outside the United States, outside American culture. My first experience where I was identified as an outsider, a foreigner, an “other.” It was my first time speaking another language, dreaming in another language. I grew up in a prosperous blue collar town (remember them?) and experienced culture shock when I entered an Ivy League college, a place of high culture, wealth, and privilege. But that was nothing compared to entering life in Afghanistan…and re-entering life in America at the conclusion of two years of service. My frame of reference had been shifted. My world would never more contract into my earlier perspective. And when I began to teach about the world’s first cities in the Fertile Crescent, the hair stood up on the back of my neck because I had lived the contemporary version of that life in the streets and bazaars of Kabul. I was time traveling and didn’t know it.
If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
When you get hit by a fastball it will hurt, but you’ll survive.
I was a good hitter until middle school when baseball pitchers were hurling real fastballs. I became afraid when I stepped up to the plate. I was no longer a good hitter. Ten years later I confronted that fear and learned to hit fastballs.
Serves as a good metaphor. Confront your fears and learn to hit fastballs.
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
Advice to the smartest guys in the room: (1) There’s always somebody smarter, stronger, faster, more talented than you. (2) As Jeff Bridges quipped to his Zen master, “You don’t recognize who I think I am.” (3) Late in life Carl Jung said, “When I was young I admired people who were brilliant. Now that I’m older I admire people who are kind.”
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. When do you feel most at peace?
When I’m immersed in work and shift out of consciousness, out of the planning side of my brain, out of intentionality, and my ego disappears, and time disappears, and process is everything, and experimentation knows that failures are only mile-markers on the journey.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jklongart.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jklongart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jklongart/
