Ian Long

Ian has been a practicing artist since he graduated with a B.A honours in Fine Art from the University of Huddersfield in 2001. He is a painter whose work has been exhibited widely and has previously been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. He has also won awards for his art such as the John James Hamer Scholarship. His work flits between abstraction and representation to suggest a place that hovers between the real and unreal. He has a strong interest in nature and natural forms but is also influenced by a myriad of sources ranging from film, photography, literature and his own archive of clippings. Ian likes to experiment with different painting techniques in which he splashes, scrapes, drips and presses the paint until an image forms that then needs to be manipulated and resolved. These forms sometimes emerge as organic shapes that seem to float across the surface. In other works figurative elements can be seen which appear to be receding or emerging out of the canvas.