Robert Longyear is a visual artist with academic jewelry training, but his work extends far beyond the friendly confines of craft. He makes sculptures, collages, paintings, and installations; he takes photographs; and he is an astonishingly prolific poet. Longyear is informed by a generational change in taste/practice that is near revolutionary. But unlike many of his peers, he has espoused a true 21st century humanism devoid of the ironic distancing that has characterized contemporary art for the past 30 years.
Longyear is emphatically part of this generational shift. He is not always interested in making a nicely resolved object that sits on a pedestal in a clean white space, ready for aesthetic delectation. For him, aesthetics—the business of beauty and its analogs—is not a major concern. Instead, he thinks in terms of process, collision of forms and the potential social impact of art. To Longyear, art-making is an adventure.
Poetry is the one constant in Longyear’s otherwise eclectic work. His visual metaphors derive from his poems, which have a strong hip-hop flavor. The poems may seem to be improvised, but that’s only partly true. Longyear relies on a set of similes and metaphors, which he can then vary, much like a jazz musician uses a melody as a starting-point for improvisation. For Longyear, the riffing might take place in a performance, but it might also be integral to an installation, a community project, a painting, a sculpture, or a piece of jewelry.
His greater body of work has catalogued an evolution of his own personal style, and our collective, immediate social and cultural environment. It’s about taking risks, and not being afraid of failure. It’s a combination of poetry and anything else. It’s setting up a structure and seeing what happens. It’s thinking on the fly. It’s getting people involved. It’s about the empowerment to think and do.
As a wordsmith and craftsman, Longyear uses text, type, simple symbolic icons, and context as a formulated method in his work – crafting enigmatic visual and written poetry across all contemporary mediums of expression. He uses words/symbols; spoken, written, and drawn to craft narratives of slippery meaning that allow their viewer to insert their own expectations of where the story is heading, while bringing their own lives to the work in a contemporary codification of text, type, and context.
”When I paint, I’m chasing a feeling not unlike the amphetamine fueled moments in middle / high school when I would drop a cutie note (written in my best handwriting) into the locker of a sweetie girl that I was into. Thinking most of us can relate. We had all better mean what we say / write; because you cannot get it back if it is locked up safe.”
- Robert Longyear
Longyear is emphatically part of this generational shift. He is not always interested in making a nicely resolved object that sits on a pedestal in a clean white space, ready for aesthetic delectation. For him, aesthetics—the business of beauty and its analogs—is not a major concern. Instead, he thinks in terms of process, collision of forms and the potential social impact of art. To Longyear, art-making is an adventure.
Poetry is the one constant in Longyear’s otherwise eclectic work. His visual metaphors derive from his poems, which have a strong hip-hop flavor. The poems may seem to be improvised, but that’s only partly true. Longyear relies on a set of similes and metaphors, which he can then vary, much like a jazz musician uses a melody as a starting-point for improvisation. For Longyear, the riffing might take place in a performance, but it might also be integral to an installation, a community project, a painting, a sculpture, or a piece of jewelry.
His greater body of work has catalogued an evolution of his own personal style, and our collective, immediate social and cultural environment. It’s about taking risks, and not being afraid of failure. It’s a combination of poetry and anything else. It’s setting up a structure and seeing what happens. It’s thinking on the fly. It’s getting people involved. It’s about the empowerment to think and do.
As a wordsmith and craftsman, Longyear uses text, type, simple symbolic icons, and context as a formulated method in his work – crafting enigmatic visual and written poetry across all contemporary mediums of expression. He uses words/symbols; spoken, written, and drawn to craft narratives of slippery meaning that allow their viewer to insert their own expectations of where the story is heading, while bringing their own lives to the work in a contemporary codification of text, type, and context.
”When I paint, I’m chasing a feeling not unlike the amphetamine fueled moments in middle / high school when I would drop a cutie note (written in my best handwriting) into the locker of a sweetie girl that I was into. Thinking most of us can relate. We had all better mean what we say / write; because you cannot get it back if it is locked up safe.”
- Robert Longyear