These paintings are pure improvisational riffs as in jazz. In homage to backcountry treks in the mountain West and Africa, Long gave these paintings titles such as Groundwater Forest and Soldier Meadows.

The same year, Long extended the idea of the jazz riff in visual terms in the Koakoland, Etosha, and Carizzo series. These paintings had twin sources in an expedition to northern Namibia and in an Elsworth Kelly picture of 1951 called Cite'. Tribal pattern-making, mirages on the salt pans and Kelly converge in these works in their many variations. Long extrapolates on these ideas through the follow-up series titled Waves, RipRap and Orchard.

By 2003, while Long was building himself an adjunct studio on his ranch 125 miles north of San Francisco, he discovered an approach that amplified the bouyancy of his paintings.

Using a lighter touch in terms of tones, textures and sensibility, he juxtaposed painted striations and loopy biomorphic forms. As in his previous work, the resulting paintings also reflected his environment; the ranks of pear trees that lined neighboring orchards found parallels in semi-orderly rows in Long's new paintings including his Orchard and RipRap series.

The winding, wobbly shapes of the Shimmy series seem to relate to the zen garden-like ridges of soil thrown up by Long's old tractor.

It is in the Shimmy, Wobble and China Basin series that Long most enthusiastically embraces the upbeat, high-key components of mid-twentieth century Modernism. Growing up together as cultural siblings, Modernism and jazz are reunited in these works.

When he is painting, Long's instinct is always to, "reshuffle the deck, throwing together the seemingly incompatible and hoping for a new equilibrium." In his China Basin series, he sends straight-edges colliding with sinuous shapes. Long takes forms directly from mid-twentieth century painting and bounces them back in order to give viewers another look, while making explicit the link between the Modern and art forms of traditional societies. In Modernism the artist finds new ways to successfully redefine an older vocabulary. Atoll and Archipelago play on this dichotomy and point up both the universality and the frailty of the rigging inherent in making art.

Long breathes conviction into the painting enterprise by encouraging some of its chief attributes - finesse, power, beauty, and metaphor.