The Curious Case of Colors
Title
Preview
Medium
acrylic on wood
Artist Biography
Ohio born and raised, Dennis Long grew up in Dayton and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Education from Miami University. After teaching for five years in the Dayton Public School system, he moved to Twinsburg, Ohio where he taught at Twinsburg High School for several years before becoming a full-time student at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Upon graduation with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Dennis worked as a self-employed artist. His paintings have been hung in both corporate and private collections, including Sherwin Williams and the Toledo Hilton. Dennis currently serves as an adjunct faculty member at Cuyahoga Community College Eastern Campus and recently won a juror’s award at the May Show at Lakeland.
Artist's Statement
As with many artists, I’ve had a lifelong love and fascination with color. It finally started to coalesce for me image wise in a number of previous series. With this series, “So, You Say You Want To Do Something Around The Edges, Eh”, I’m pursuing a visual clarity for my work by constraining the number of elements and materials to compose the work – a “less is more” approach, while parring out the visual clutter and emphasizing texture, hue, value, line and dimension to create the image. Their size, rectangular shape and scale give me an opportunity to toy with peripheral vision with the focal point and accent hues positioned on one of the sides of either a vertical or horizontal shape. The stretched canvas helps with softening the edges of its shapes compared to the sharp edges of the exposed wood. It’s a contained approach of material for the most effective use of the painting’s color field and hues to accent the composition. With all these elements in combination, I hope the viewer is rewarded for the time they’ve spent lingering and exploring the color field, color rhythms and atmospherics of these paintings.