Benjamin F. Long, IV
Ben Long, the grandson of the artist McKendree Robbins Long, was raised in North Carolina. At the age of eighteen, Long enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he studied creative writing with the novelist and poet Reynolds Price. He then moved to New York City to join the Art Students League where he studied with the master drawing instructor Robert Beverly Hale and painting teacher Frank Herbert Mason. In 1969, Long confronted the situation of many young men during the Vietnam conflict. Rather than be drafted into the United States Army, Long enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He then served two tours of duty in Vietnam. During his second tour he commanded the Marine Corps Combat Art Team, artists in uniform who depict the Marine Corps role during conflict. The Smithsonian Institution and US Marine Corps Museum of Washington, D.C., house much of Long’s combat art.
"To work from life is an ever learning process - a staircase where the incline becomes steeper the further one reaches, yet each platform is also deeper, more dangerous, more wondrous."
-- Ben Long
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After military service, Long moved to Florence, Italy, to serve as apprentice to the master painter and fresco artist Pietro Annigoni. For nearly eight years, Long studied not only portraiture and painting but also the distinctive and difficult art of fresco painting. Under Annigoni’s tutelage, Long created several frescoes in Italy, including the only fresco by a non-Italian at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino. These works set the stage for several major fresco projects in the U.S. (14 to this day), including a dome and the largest secular fresco in the United States, located in the lobby of the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, NC.
In 2001, Long was awarded the coveted Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition
(Classical America, New York, New York) by Philippe de Montebello, the longest-serving Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2002, Long received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work is also included in the Art Renewal Center's exclusive list of "Living Masters."
Today Long divides his time between his homes in Italy, Charleston, South Carolina, and Asheville, North Carolina. In 2002, he established the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas to instruct select students in a multi-year atelier tradition. Long and his faculty teach their students to create works by direct observation of the human figure, knowledge of human anatomy, and appreciation of the emotional elements of composition, atmosphere, and color. Long also uses his fresco commissions as teaching opportunities. His teams of students and experienced artists work together to learn by surmounting the challenges of one of the most difficult artistic media, large-scale fresco painting. Long’s early accomplishments as a fresco painter are chronicled in Wet-Wall Tattoos: Ben Long and the Art of Fresco by Richard Maschal (1993).
 Available Work - Please contact the gallery to see more
Drawings and Studies from Current Fresco
Drawings for Fresco
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Realists
