Sarah Longley

The through-line

Everything Sarah Longley says about her work circles back to a single conviction: that drawing is at its best when the thinking part of the brain gets out of the way. She describes charcoal as so familiar after three decades that "it feels a bit like an extension of my fingers when I'm using it" [1], and she prizes the fast pose, the withheld mark and the untouched paper precisely because they force instinct to take over from deliberation. Discipline, in her account, is not about adding more but about restraint: knowing what to leave alone, and how few strokes a figure actually needs.

The second thread is relationship. Her drawing life is bound up with her father's poems, an illustrating partnership that began when she was five and has since grown into fine press books, charcoal drawings and paintings [1]. She treats that work as both artistic problem and act of closeness, a way "to be close to Dad and to really kind of dive deeply into his poems" [1].

On charcoal as the perfect medium

Charcoal is her default and her argument. She values it for being "so tactile and responsive" and for "the array of different Mars you can get with it" [1], a range that lets her be "quite softt and sensitive with it but also very bold" and cover large areas "with a big kind of arch of your shoulder and a rag" [1]. Its versatility is also its subject range: "it's got clouds grasses water um Stones humans everything it just seems like the perfect medium to me" [1]. Long use is part of the case. Having worked with it since art college, roughly thirty years, she describes a fluency that no longer passes through conscious decision [1].

On white space and carving back

She works as much by subtraction as addition. Certain areas are simply protected: "areas that I want to remain white and I will just purposefully leave them untouched um so I have to be quite sort of disciplined about that", a rule she applies to water and clouds in particular [1]. Beyond that deliberate abstention there is the reverse operation, "kind of carving it back again which you can do with charcoal", which she calls "the magic of charcoal" [1]. Negative space and erasure are not corrections in her practice; they are two of the medium's primary tools.

On economy of marks and drawing fast

Reading Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother sharpened an ambition she now carries into the studio: van Gogh's attempt to "capture a figure in three or four strokes", which has left her "trying to um be as economical as possible with the marks" [1]. She sets that ambition alongside Rembrandt's drawings of people as models of the same compression [1]. The training ground is life drawing, where sessions open with three-minute poses. She acknowledges the resistance this provokes, "people get a bit annoyed about it because it's hard it's so hard", and defends it anyway as "a great discipline to try and draw fast", especially for figures in movement [1]. The payoff is the state she keeps returning to: "it's almost like the thinking part of your brain just switches off and it's becomes instinctive" [1].

On illustrating her father's poems

The collaboration started with a childhood commission, a drawing of lapwings for a Christmas card, which became an annual event that has continued ever since [1]. It moved to another level through the fine press poetry books, after a publisher approached her father at a reading with the idea of a chapbook of around a dozen poems illustrated by a single artist, and she was chosen [1]. That work brought her back to pen drawing, which she describes as demanding "a yeah different level of concentration" [1]. The subjects have ranged widely: an opening book of nature poems rooted in Mayo, then a Holocaust sequence, "Ghetto", a Homer book, "Homer's octopus", and most recently an Ovid volume, "Metamorphoses", with the newest returning to birds and flowers [1]. Her illustrations for these collections of her father's poems based on the Classics of Homer and Ovid are how the work is publicly known [5]. Crucially, the pen drawings do not stay in the books: charcoal drawings develop out of them, and even large oil paintings [1].

On exhibiting and what a drawing carries

Membership of the Rua, which she has held for around four years, gives her the right to show one or two pieces in its annual open exhibition, and she is direct about the good fortune in that [1]. Her submission is a large charcoal drawing based on her father's poem about Laertes, taken from Homer, on the reunion between Odysseus and his father [1]. Her hope for it is not formal but human: that "it would have a resonance with people for anyone that's been separated from a loved one and been reunited", a resonance she connects explicitly to the experience of Covid [1].

On being allowed to become an artist

She is clear-eyed that art is "not necessarily the most um viable career option" and equally clear about how much circumstance helped [1]. Growing up "in a fairly Bohemian household" among artists and musicians meant that wanting to go to art college "wasn't seen as like terribly scandalous", where friends of hers had families who would not have approved [1]. She frames that encouragement as luck rather than entitlement, and it shapes the way she talks about everything that followed.

Takeaways

• Charcoal earns its place through range: soft and sensitive, or bold enough to cover large areas with the sweep of a shoulder and a rag, and capable of rendering "clouds grasses water um Stones humans everything" [1].
• Untouched white paper is a deliberate, disciplined choice, used for water and clouds, and works alongside the ability to carve marks back out again [1].
• Van Gogh's ambition to capture a figure in three or four strokes, and Rembrandt's drawings, drive her pursuit of maximum economy of mark [1].
• Three-minute life-drawing poses are hard and unpopular, and that is the point: speed switches off deliberation and makes drawing instinctive [1].
• A childhood lapwing drawing for a Christmas card became an annual tradition and eventually a body of illustrated fine press books spanning nature poems, "Ghetto", "Homer's octopus" and "Metamorphoses" [1].
• Pen work for the books feeds back into charcoal drawings and large oil paintings rather than remaining self-contained [1].
• Her charcoal drawing of the Laertes reunion is offered as an image for anyone separated from and reunited with a loved one, including through Covid [1].
• A bohemian household made art college an unremarkable choice for her, an advantage she does not take for granted given art's uncertain viability as a career [1].