It’s the studio/office of assistant art professor Jeremy Long, who made his way to Wright State University and its Creative Arts Center after a tumultuous journey through the art world from Chicago to Rome. He lives in Oakwood.
“They really are invested in the creative arts here,” said Long, who joined the faculty in 2012. “Wright State enables me to share my skills and experience with the students while indulging in my painting habit.”
Born and raised in the Windy City, Long remains a Chicagoan to the bone. And he remains a Chicago sports fanatic, listening to Chicago sports radio as he paints.
As a young child, Long experimented with drawing and painting and discovered he was better than most. It soon became a defining characteristic of his personality.
His mother, a corporate paralegal, worked hard to send Long to Chicago Academy for the Arts, a nontraditional high school.
After graduating, he received a scholarship to the highly regarded Kansas City Art Institute and in 1995 obtained his bachelor’s degree in fine arts with a concentration in painting.
Returning to Chicago, Long and several other painters moved into an apartment in a historic Gold Coast neighborhood building that is now the luxury Hotel Sofitel. He got a job down the street at a specialty store as a wine and cheese consultant, an expertise he developed in Kansas City.
In 1997, a man who came to a show liked Long’s work and offered him and a fellow painter the use of his apartment in Rome’s Piazza Barberini and his villa in the hill town of Calcata north of Rome.
Long returned to Chicago in 1998 and made ends meet by painting murals for bars and restaurants. Then he enrolled in a summer arts program at Chautauqua, a historic artist community in western New York state where he met his future wife, Colleen.
The couple went on to graduate school at American University in Washington, D.C., where Long got his master’s degree in fine arts with a concentration in painting.
There was a whirlwind of teaching jobs for Long over the next few years — at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., the American Academy of Art in Chicago and Ithaca College in New York.
Then Long learned of a faculty opening at Wright State and applied for it.
“I knew what kind of program they ran here,” Long said. “It’s centered on observational drawing and painting, working from life, really trying to understand structure that is in painting. And also looking really closely at art of the past — the masters.”
Long teaches painting and drawing to undergraduates, who are hoping to become professional artists.
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