Born: New York City
Currently based: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
mlongartist@gmail.com
2008 MFA University of Colorado
2004 BFA College of Santa Fe
1986-87 Art Students League of New York under Richard Pousette-Dart.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work emerges from a lifelong commitment to painting as a daily, contemplative practice. Over four decades, I have developed a visual language rooted in symbolic abstraction, spiritual landscape, and the quiet architecture of inner experience. The forms that appear in my paintings — stylized trees, vessels, birds, crystalline structures, symbols, radiant fields — are not illustrations of the visible world but metaphors for states of being. They function as thresholds, markers, and energetic presences within a terrain that is part landscape, part dream, part emotional map.
Color is my primary instrument of transformation. I use it to create atmospheres that feel both ancient and immediate, familiar and otherworldly. Within these chromatic environments, geometric and organic forms coexist, suggesting the tension between structure and intuition, order and mystery. Each painting becomes a symbolic ecosystem, a place where archetypal forms gather and converse.
My practice is guided by the belief that painting can reveal what is otherwise unseen — the mythic, the spiritual, the interior. I work slowly, layering gestures, shapes, and tonal shifts until the image arrives at a sense of inevitability. The paintings are invitations to pause, to enter a space of stillness, and to encounter the deeper currents that move beneath the surface of ordinary perception.