About Speaker

Soil Summit Illustration
It was an honor to be asked to produce the first illustration of its kind for the annual Soil Summit. My goal was to visually strip away the soil media and provide an unobstructed look into a sphere-shaped sample of beneficial and charismatic microfauna, all swirling around fungus-enhanced root tips. For reference, I looked closely at two different types of imagery in order to combine the "best of both worlds" in my drawing: optical microscopy (whose subjects display a backlit transparency, but appear as a very flat, shallow sliver) and scanning electron microscopy (whose subjects appear fully opaque, but display incredible depth). Of these animals I drew with a translucent quality, the shape-shifting Free Amoeba was the most fun to draw. The lights, darks, textures, and details you see in the full image are all drawn with very fine mechanical pencils and sharpened erasers, while I added the color and punch later in Adobe Photoshop— all together a mixed-media technique I use for much of my illustration work.

Biography
Robert Long is a visual artist and educator from Silver Spring, Maryland. His zoologically-focused artwork has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. In 2013 he became Arizona’s first and only finalist in the internationally juried Adobe Design Achievement Awards. His illustrations have been published by Frontiers in Microbiology, Manifest Press, the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, and Edible Baja Arizona Magazine, among others. Long is also an avid photographer with experience in macro-photography and an interest in natural subjects, especially marine invertebrates.

Long earned his MFA at the University of Arizona in Tucson and later taught visual arts at Pima Community College. He now holds the position of Teaching Professor of Visual Communication at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

Statement
I aim to inspire curiosity in the intricacies of the natural world, and by extension, promote nature conservation. My personal research hones in on symbiosis, or the living together of unlike organisms. Deep within these animals' relationships, I aim to understand interdependency— the way in which their lives cross into another. Fueled by biology and protoscience, my artwork amplifies intimate and obscure forms of life in order to give underrepresented organisms a louder voice and to visualize their self-worlds or Umwelten.

I stay inspired by visiting natural history museums and aquaria and by tending to my coral reef aquarium. A natural curiosity pushes me along, often to places I didn’t expect to be. I grew up catching bugs and collecting fossilized sharks' teeth in Maryland, where my friends later introduced me to crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay.