What kind of an artist is Richard Long? Since his first solo show at the Konrad Fischer Dusseldorf Gallery in 1968, Long has resisted (but not altogether avoided) describing what he does. Mostly, he walks – in Africa, on beaches, for eight days in Korea, across Somerset; he lays stones and twigs in lines and circles, hand-prints with mud, piles rocks in remote places, takes photographs of the results, and later rehouses a few of the flint cairns or chalk causeways in art galleries. “I like the simplicity of walking, the simplicity of stones”, he has said. He defies the notion that he is self-consciously romantic, in pursuit of an idealistic, or primitivist essence. And if his practice is “conceptual”, then it is conceived without pretension, in a state of Zen withdrawal, where a walk may also be a self-emptying prayer.

So Long is not really a conceptualist, and certainly not a conventional painter or sculptor. We might also question whether he is the artistic child of simplicity he claims to be. Though his images are impressively plain, with echoes (whatever he may say) of the Neolithic, they are sophisticated, too: his Nature is as beautifully refined as any garden designed by Capability Brown. Readers will have the chance to reflect further on these dilemmas of interpretation when Judith Flanders reports back from the major new Richard Long retrospective, Heaven and Earth, in a future issue of the TLS. Or if they fancy the walk, they can visit the exhibition itself, at London’s Tate Britain, until September 6.

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