Cody DeLong | Unplugged

By Gussie Fauntleroy

This story was featured in the February 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Sometimes, as Cody DeLong is standing at the easel in his Jerome, AZ, studio and gallery, where he works several days a week, a tourist will wander in, head still tilted down in that ubiquitous staring-at-a-phone-screen angle. DeLong steps away from the canvas and starts up a conversation. It’s a chance to share his artistic passion with others, of course. But he also enjoys watching as visitors, especially teenagers and young adults, pocket their phones and shift gears. Their eyes often widen in pleasure as DeLong describes hiking or riding his dirt bike into amazing landscapes to paint, or asks about their own creative interests. “In an instant, their virtual life becomes real life,” the 55-year-old artist says.

That connection with the tangible world is part of what pulls DeLong to remote canyons and mesas around the Southwest, his backpack filled with plein-air painting supplies. Likewise, a desire for authenticity keeps him based in the historic mining town of Jerome, where he has painted and sold his work for almost 20 years. Especially in the section of town where his studio occupies a 1905 Studebaker dealership, many of the buildings retain a feeling of times gone by.

HULL AVE. HANGOVER, for instance, depicts a scene just a block from the studio. One building has an added-onto-over-the-years look, while next to it a former storefront advertises its past in layers of faintly visible hand-lettered signage, one on top of the other. DeLong’s painting itself contains vestiges of what it once was: an unsuccessful piece he painted over in blue-gray oils before rendering the new image on top. Bits of underpainting show through, and the layers translate into textures of stucco, cracked concrete sidewalks, and old metal and wood. “It’s a snapshot in time,” DeLong says. “There’s an entrepreneurial spirit in Jerome, but folks aren’t always good businesspeople, so there are a lot of ghosts of old businesses in those buildings.”

DeLong’s own entrepreneurial track followed a roundabout route before he reached Jerome. Raised with three sisters in small-town Michigan, he spent much of his boyhood outdoors, fishing and swimming in the nearby Grand River and playing in the woods. There were no art museums or galleries to explore, and no one Cody knew was an artist. His father worked as an engineer in Grand Rapids and passed on mechanical and building skills to his son. DeLong’s mother was at home raising her family when Cody was young. Still, seemingly from out of nowhere, as far back as he can remember, he had a powerful desire to draw. His two grandmothers noticed and encouraged his interest. “I guess they saw it as something to keep me out of trouble,” he says, smiling. But they also instilled in their grandson the idea that he could become anything he wanted in life. “I believed them,” he says. “I just had a feeling that I would become an artist.”

But first he needed to roar through his passion for speed, competing in motocross and motorcycle road-racing. He worked briefly as a machinist in the auto industry and then at an industrial printing press, where the four-color separation process gave him a “root understanding of color,” he says. When the press asked for voluntary summer layoffs during an economic slowdown, DeLong bought an airbrush and a compressor and taught himself airbrush illustration. His trajectory toward fine art had begun. He produced airbrushed designs on T-shirts and, in his mid-20s, moved to Las Vegas to train airbrush artists at a casino-based concession. On the side he did custom painting on car hoods, Harleys, and casino-show backdrops, and soon he opened his own shop for custom airbrush work.

It was a fun life for a while. But Las Vegas in the 1980s had little to offer in the way of culture, and the aspiring artist was soon ready for a change. So when a designer creating molded-foam fanny packs offered him a job, and DeLong realized he could work remotely, he bought a small camper and took off. For four years he traveled around the country, using pay phones and FedEx to communicate with the designer in those pre-smartphone days. He installed a drafting table in the camper and created airbrushed designs, mostly at night. During the day he rode his dirt bike farther into remote areas, where he taught himself to paint the landscape in oils. He had a couple of basic art-instruction books, and later he took workshops at the Loveland Academy of Fine Arts and the Scottsdale Artists’ School. At first, however, his self-instruction was “really just a matter of brush mileage,” he says. “I had a burning desire to be an artist, and I was too stubborn to think I couldn’t do it.”

Inevitably, the desire to be an artist meant the need for creative freedom, and DeLong left the world of commercial art behind. In the late 1990s he settled in the town of Cottonwood, AZ, southwest of Sedona, and began selling his work in nearby Jerome. He’s had his current studio/gallery there for nine years. Especially in the winter, when the sun is low and the shadows are long, he loves to travel and paint in places like northern Arizona’s Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, southern Utah, and New Mexico. Or he hikes or rides his mountain bike in the hills and canyons closer to home. Or he finds compelling images just wandering around Jerome. “This is a wonderful playground for me,” he says. “I’m physically exploring the world and exploring my artistic vision at the same time.”

Almost every summer for the past 12 years, DeLong has led an eight-day rafting/painting excursion for artists on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. “It’s always an incredible experience,” he says. “You’re down there completely unplugged, with just the sound of the river and the birds, and with fellow art geeks.” Out of that experience come paintings like ASPIRATIONS, inspired by the breathtaking verticality captured in photos the artist took while floating beside a cliff wall. “When you’re at river level, you get a sense of just how vertical and tall the walls are,” he adds. “It’s a whole other world down there.”

Beginning his process with plein-air sketches and photos, DeLong finishes some pieces on location, but most he completes in the studio. “When I’m not in a plein-air competition, I don’t pressure myself to create finished paintings on site. It’s more about getting the atmosphere and my reaction to the subtleties of the place—things a camera can’t catch,” he says. “It’s very pleasurable just to paint most of it and then bring it back to the studio.” His efforts have paid off. Among the honors that have come his way in the past few years are first place, artists’ choice, best in show, and purchase awards at events like the Grand Canyon Celebration of Art, the Sedona Arts Festival, and the Phippen Museum’s Western Art Show & Sale.

DeLong continues to paint prolifically, although this year he’ll attend fewer plein-air shows to make time for a new project: Inspired by the masters of the golden age of illustration (the late 1800s through the mid-20th century) and by today’s graphic novels, he plans to produce a series of storyboard-like sketches to illustrate a fictional narrative he’s developing, set in the future in Jerome. He’ll select a few of these images to work into oil paintings and also create a book with the full series. He envisions the project culminating in a show featuring printed chapter excerpts, storyboard sketches, and the paintings. The book’s protagonist is—naturally—an artist, with a sidekick named Dizzy Lizard. The backstory weaves in Jerome’s mining history and tourism, with future tourists as likely to arrive from off-planet as from elsewhere on Earth.

Meanwhile in present-day Jerome, DeLong stands at his easel and lets whatever subject he’s painting tell him what to pull from his toolbox of techniques. Is it about color or textural qualities? Should the paint application be thick or transparent or a combination of both to create a dynamic surface tension? Softer brushwork or big, bold strokes? Lately he finds himself increasingly interested in deconstructing an image just enough to bring out its abstract elements while staying within the realm of realism. “Often when people walk in, they think I represent three different artists,” he says. “I’m always experimenting and challenging myself. It keeps me growing and interested in painting.”

Regardless of his approach and style, DeLong’s underlying aim remains the same: to express and share those aspects of the physical world that have entranced and nurtured him all his life. “We live in a really chaotic world with a lot of negative things that people can get wrapped up in,” he says. “But one of the things art brings to us is this: We can choose to live a graceful life. We can choose to focus on the good. Art gives us that moment of reflection and shows us there’s still a lot that is good and beautiful in the world.”

representationCody DeLong Studio, Jerome, AZ.

This story was featured in the February 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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