Warren Long, 1953 - 2016
“I’ve never lived out of sight of the ocean, “ wrote Santa Monica painter Warren Long, “and that’s where I derive most of my inspiration.” The immensely popular artist, lifelong surfer and runner died suddenly on January 2 of a massive heart attack.
Long, who worked in a studio on the Malibu Beach near Big Rock, founded Santa Monica’s Hamilton Galleries in 1996 with his late wife, actress Leigh Hamilton. The successful Ocean Avenue gallery, known for its lively, well-attended openings, showcased Long’s representational paintings, instantly recognizable for their vibrant, sun-washed colors and inspired, fanciful themes, resonant with California beach life.
Long’s style defied pigeonholing, which was his exact intention. Beautiful women swanned in magical seascapes. There were mermaids and swimmers, beauties doing water ballet, and dolphins mid-air. Starry nights glimmered and humor abounded: dachshunds cavorted; pigs pogoed and swam. Not uncommonly, religious iconography gleaned from a childhood spent partly in Mexico added layers of allusion to figurative landscapes.
A self-described “humorous anarchist,” Warren Long was born in 1953 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in the San Francisco Bay area, the son of an activist Oakland lawyer and a mother who was an illustrator. After graduating from San Francisco State University with a B.S. in ecological systematic biology, he’d originally planned to be a doctor. Extended time spent visiting a hospitalized quadriplegic brother, however, convinced him otherwise. “I couldn’t see myself being so exact, doling out medicine,” he said later. “I’m too casual for that.”
After working as a chef in Marin County, Long moved to Southern California, where he began making functional art, fabricating sculpted furniture for the former Tops Gallery in Malibu. Work as a muralist followed, but it was painting that held his interest. “What I wanted to do was splash paint onto canvas, “ he recalled. “There is an immediate gratification in that.”
Widely exhibited, Long’s work enjoyed a celebrity following. Among his better-known collectors were Brooke Adams and Tony Shalhoub, Leslie and Robert Zemeckis, Mel Gibson, and Elizabeth Taylor.
An early marriage to actress Kathleen Quinlan ended in divorce. Tallulah, Long’s 15-year old daughter with Leigh Hamilton, survives him as does his mother Jane Russell, of Mendocino, California.
