About the artwork


The Circus Was All Around Us, unfolds as a charged, pulsating field of colour in which vivid magentas, ochres and deep greens move through layered veils of gesture and translucence. Built through sweeping strokes, diffused washes and abrupt flickers of line, the painting captures the sensation of being immersed in a shifting, centrifugal atmosphere where rhythm gathers and disperses at the edge of perception.

Oil paint is worked into a textured, breathing surface that holds both immediacy and reconsideration. Traces of revision, buried marks and luminous re-emergences create a sense of movement held in suspension, where moments of intensity soften into calmer passages. The painting carries a trace of the circus’ chaotic exuberance, its surges of colour and sweeping motions echoing an environment where sensation presses in from all sides. The interplay of saturated colour and looser, more diffused passages generates a haptic field where pigment seems to vibrate, echoing the artist’s somatic-informed approach to gesture and embodied momentum.

Anchored in Long’s ongoing exploration of colour as a generator of sensation and emotional resonance, ‘The Circus Was All Around Us’ offers a dynamic, sensorial encounter. It holds a tension between the rawness of physical mark-making and the ephemeral drift of atmosphere, inviting the viewer into a space where perception becomes rhythmic, fluid and charged with the possibility of transformation.

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