Artist Vicki Long creates from what others leave behind

By CAROLYN YOUNGER
For the Register

Forget about trying to pigeonhole artist V.E. Long — aka Vicki Long, Vicki Cooley, or, more than a decade ago in her commercial art mode, Vicki Hoffman.

Long, one of 72 participants in this month’s Open Studios tour, will be sharing a space with fellow artists Molly Kruse, Don Judah and June Lee at the St. Helena upper campus of Napa Valley College.

Long will travel to the exhibition with nearly 300 pieces of her own work to display, transported by horse trailer from her Angwin ranch. In addition to the abstract charcoal and acrylic figures she is known for, there will be totems, mosaics, collages, monotypes, landscapes and the mixed- media constructions she calls “assemblages.”

Her paintings and assemblages are exhibited in galleries and museums in New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Alaska, Hawaii, Taiwan and the Napa Valley, and can be found in both private and corporate collections. The variety of her work reflects the influences of figurative painter Paul Wonner, sculptor Louise Nevelson, and found-object artists Allison Sarr and Ed and Nancy Kienholz.

Long, an inventive recycler, uses a capacious purse as a receptacle for found objects and thrift shop odds and ends — bridal cake ornaments, map pins, lead figures with missing heads, miniature trophies, nightlights, ceramic birds, dashboard Madonnas, old photos, board games, plastic palm trees, clock faces, belt buckles, dice and tiny plastic skeletons — small elements that add to the larger message of her frequently edgy assemblages.

The handbag came in handy one Tuesday a while back as she was preparing to teach a life drawing class at Rutherford Grange following a weekend wedding.

“They hadn’t cleaned up very well,” Long recalled, “and there was a cake decoration, the bride with her head snapped off.”

In the purse it went and later became part of Long’s “Trophy Bride” assemblage.

“Ever since I was a kid I’ve been addicted to junk,” Long admitted. “I really believe that one man’s trash is definitely another person’s treasure.”

Collecting started early

The interest in creating assemblages started, she said, with her grandfather’s habit of smoking cigars.

During one of her long-ago summer visits to her grandparents’ Salisbury, Md., home, Long found stacks of cigar boxes in their basement. “I asked if I could have them. I was about 10 or 12.”

These soon held her pack-rat’s collection of buttons, marbles, bird bones and bottle caps, even an old doorknob from the “haunted” house next door. Inspired by roadside shrines and memorials, she now uses the boxes and their equivalents to draw the viewer’s attention to AIDS, racial inequality, divorce, missing children.

“Some of them have humor to them, some of them are about social issues,” Long said. “Some are a wake-up call that this is not a dress rehearsal — you don’t get to screw up in this life and say I’ll do better the next time around.

“So that’s what these are for. I feel that I’m getting to nag people about not being so cavalier about their lives.”

Long, 57, grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., one of eight children. It was easy to get lost in the shuffle, she said. “I was the invisible kid and I liked it.”

But every summer Long was put on a train to be a summer playmate for a young cousin. It was an arrangement Long remembers fondly. She was not only on her own with a good buddy, she was gaining a work ethic that has sustained her through thick and thin.

“My grandmother said, ‘If you want something, find a way to earn it because nobody owes you anything.’”

As soon as she graduated from high school what Long wanted was to go to California and pursue art. It took a year of working at the telephone company but by 19 she stepped off the bus in Manhattan Beach. Soon she had a job as a waitress and was creating tie-dyed clothing for a local shop.

 “Of course I was trying to save every penny, so I didn’t buy rubber gloves,” Long said. “My hands were dyed for a long time.”

She saved enough to attend El Camino College and then UC Santa Barbara, where she was a life drawing model and sang in a country rock band as she worked toward a bachelor’s degree. She laughed at the memory of being turned down as an A&W car hop. Instead she was recommended for a job as a “French fry girl” — an insult that’s taken her awhile to get over, she joked.

Finally, with a master’s of fine arts degree in hand from California State University Long Beach, Long returned to Hermosa Beach. Over the years she built a successful career as a commercial artist, which allowed her to continue her “serious” work. A brush with a speeding airport shuttle bus, however, left her with a fractured neck and immobilized right arm and hand. Undaunted, Long taught at El Camino College while she was mending.

Then came a day when she was browsing through an equestrian publication looking for a good deal on a horse trailer. Instead she came across an ad for a 10-acre ranch in Round Valley, outside Covelo in the rugged interior of Mendocino County.

“I was a smart enough cookie to know a windfall when I saw one,” Long said. “I drove up and the guy sold it to me on a handshake.”

She took on the ranch the way she took on everything else, wholeheartedly. She handled the ranch chores herself, even to the point of digging ditches in January to repair a broken pipe. Then came the Gulf War, a sagging economy and faltering art sales. Long spent no time moping. She got a job in Ukiah as an animal control officer investigating reports of abused and mistreated animals.

“It was the hardest job I had,” she recalled. What she found especially difficult was picking up stray dogs only to see them euthanized or sold for research.

“Here were these perfectly beautiful dogs, but if they didn’t have a collar they could be sold,” she said. “So I started going to thrift stores and buying old, used dog collars. After that I never brought in a dog that didn’t have a collar — I think I have five or six collars still. And I got really good at adopting dogs out.”

Next came a job as a substitute teacher for grades K-12, and an unexpected stint as an algebra teacher.

“I’d rather chew aluminum foil than teach algebra,” is how Long described her feelings about the assignment, but teach it she did, for nine weeks. Later Long signed on as education coordinator for the local Head Start program, a job she truly enjoyed, she said.

“It was all to keep my art going, my horses fed and my ranch running,” she said.

Teaching and

creating locally

Years, and a different ranch, later, Long is still teaching — life drawing and monotype through Napa Valley College — caring for her horses and dogs and following her varied artistic interests to which she has added mosaics and totem building.

She has also acquired a best friend/colleague/husband, Bob Cooley. He and Long live on the Angwin ranch that’s been in his family since the late 1800s.

Long was especially touched when Cooley turned a former chicken feed granary into a vine-shaded studio for his wife, although he had to move a building full of car parts to do it.

Sitting on the flower-filled studio deck with its recycled water trough fish pond, Long talked about the artists who inspire her, about marriage, about future plans, about her family and about the layers of meaning in the assemblages she creates.

“Almost all of them are about people caught up in circumstances greater than themselves,” she said, “which is pretty much everyone of us at one time or another. What you do to deal with it, how you become after you go through these things, that’s what these are really all about ...

“I’m not a negative person, I’m not a bitter person. I just think that life throws a lot at you, both negative and positive, and you should deal with all of it.”

What

Napa Valley Open Studios Tour

Who

Artists of all kinds from around Napa County

Where

52 locations, including galleries and artist studios

When

Sat. and Sun., Sept. 20-21 and 27-28, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Info

257-7016 or  www.nvopenstudios.com

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