Exhibitions 2006

The Telfair is delighted to present a retrospective examining the notable career of David Delong (1930-2001), a talented and versatile artist who lived in Savannah from 1994 until his death in 2001. The Telfair’s exhibition, the first retrospective of DeLong’s career, will display over 140 of the artist’s works—including drawings, etchings, watercolors, and oil paintings—and will examine his most persistent themes, such as motorcycle racing, the figure, nature, and architecture.

The exhibition commences with selected early figurative pieces from the 1950s. DeLong studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned a degree in painting from New York University. He had begun to race bikes in the late 1950s and came to view the motorcycle as a metaphor for life, exacting the same amount of control and discipline. As a result, bikes and racing became a major theme in his art.

Changing course in the 1960s, DeLong began to produce large-scale abstracted landscapes and figures rendered in a spontaneous, expressionistic style. The following decade, acting on his conviction that drawing is the most basic vehicle of expression, DeLong began to focus on works on paper. He returned to his figurative style from the 1950s, drawing subjects both real and imagined.

In the 1980s, Delong moved with his wife, Harriett, and son, Mark, to Washington D.C., where he concentrated on drawing and etching, exploring various technical processes and returning to racing for subject matter. Convinced that architecture was one of humanity’s most important aesthetic endeavors, DeLong produced a skillful series of drawings and etchings of Washington’s federal buildings.

DeLong’s move to Savannah in 1994 inspired a return to painting, although his printmaking continued unabated. He produced watercolors of the ocean at Tybee and etchings of the oak canopies and elaborate tombstones of Bonaventure Cemetery, as well as a series of mythological etchings that culminate his long interest in fantasy. The motorcycle—his metaphor for life—returned as subject matter for a series of oil paintings he was completing at the time of his death in 2001.

While David DeLong’s style shifted from figurative to abstract, and his subject matter ranged from the mundane to the fantastic, the recurring theme of the motorcycle is the consistent tie that binds his oeuvre, reinforcing his concern with the discipline and potential inherent in each artistic process. David DeLong: Passages was organized by the Telfair with the full cooperation and participation of DeLong’s widow, artist Harriett DeLong. The show will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue, with generous support provided by Mr. and Mrs. Robert MacLean of Wilson, Wyoming.

An opening reception celebrating the exhibition will be held at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, February 7th.