Richard Long (born 1945) is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, a well-known British land artist.

Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times, and he is reputed to have refused the prize in 1984. He was nominated in 1984, 1987, 1988 and he then won the award in 1989 for White Water Line.

Long was born in Bristol, and studied art at the West of England College of Art from 1962 to 1965, then graduated from St Martin's School of Art in London in 1968.

Several of his works were based around walks that he has made, and as well as land based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over.

In his work, often cited as a response to the environments he walked in, the landscape would be deliberately changed in some way, as in A Line Made by Walking (1967), and sometimes sculptures were made in the landscape from rocks or similar found materials and then photographed. Other pieces consist of photographs or maps of unaltered landscapes accompanied by texts detailing the location and time of the walk it indicates.

His piece Delabole Slate Circle, acquired from the Tate Modern in 1997, is a central piece in Bristol's main Museum and Art Gallery.

A permanent installation is on view in the main lobby of Hearst Tower (New York City) entitled Riverlines. Completed during the summer of 2006 and the biggest wall work he had ever made - about 35 x 50 feet (11 x 15 meters).

What's next? Richard Long, the veteran land and process artist (and precursor of Andy Goldsworthy), is suddenly one step away from working on canvas.

He has transferred his elegant cross-hatch and spiraling patterns, made by hand with river mud, which usually whirl and drip across great expanses of wall space, to conveniently portable pieces of plywood. Granted, the step to canvas is long and not likely. The artist's 35-year interest in process, performance and natural materials remain fairly intact.

The mud is either light brown (harvested by the artist from the River Avon) or white (the Cornish china clay used in porcelain); it is applied either to bare plywood or over a black hard-edge shape or motif. (Nice touch: the plywood comes with red sealant on its edges.)

Still, while the splatters and drips instill a sense of choreography, speed and direction, and give a strong sense of the artist's physical presence, the general effect is of preciousness. The inherent refinement of Mr. Long's touch, always evident, now prevails with a result that feels corralled, downsized and domesticated.

Basically, the works here bring too much else to mind: Jasper Johns's cross-hatches, unlikely collaborations between Richard Serra and Pat Steir, or some kind of skillfully made decorator objects that might appear in a Calvin Klein ad. It will be interesting to see where things go from here. No artist can escape transitional works if growth is the aim, and Mr. Long's stature may entitle him to extra slack.