Artwork as magic

When you are confronted with a painting with the strength, the poetic emanation, and the beauty that Tage Lundin expresses in his work, then you are overwhelmed and realize that art can be vital. You feel the significance and sometimes the magnitude that pictures, paintings, and other artwork lend you strength, intimacy, and vitality.
I saw Tage Lundin’s paintings and got the feeling that I recognized and now knew that artwork can catch hold of life.
I wondered how Tage’s pictures influenced me.

When art is meaningful, teeming with life and abundant with magical emanation, then the question becomes no other than - how does work influence me?
It is not a question of decorations to hang on the wall as some kind of embellishment. Tage Lundin’s paintings are not a question of charming surfaces or seductive beauty. This is true even if they to have an inner, quaking beauty, beauty is never the goal. As I see it, he is not trying to please the onlooker. He is not trying to seduce the audience with that which is “beautiful” or stylish. This so even if his paintings can be “stylish.”

Indeed, it is the inner strength and inner qualities that are essential. It is those feelings that his paintings entice me and other observers that are of importance. I would venture to say that his paintings respond a need the audience has and that sees artwork as something other than superficial graffiti.
The artwork is derived from his hands and his heart and is answers the longing within us to fill our innermost needs.

What do we want to do with our lives? What is under the surface of our fragile search in our weak or, maybe, strong lives? I’m not actually certain that Tage Lundin thinks along those lines when he is motivated to bring forth his sensitive paintings, nor is that even important. It is the tracks left behind from the gestures of his hands; it is the brush’s strokes over the surface of the picture that create the magic of painting.

That is when I see so well and so clearly and so intimately the mysterious love that finds its place in his brush marks.
I see how his colors and brushes are the tools that find their way toward existence’s significant and overshadowing love. His pictures speak a lyric language to me, and to all of them who want to see. He permits the surface of the picture to become a playground for the inner adventure that actually is the essence of all art. It deals with an artist who, without a doubt, resolutely is true to his task of relating for the rest of us the magic of life. He bears the artist’s burden to convey that which is not easy to relate in any other way than through art.
The artist is said to be the prophet who tells the rest of us about the intimate essence of life, perhaps even in its deepest meaning. This can sound pretentious, but actually it is limpidly easy.

What I am saying now is not anything that Tage Lundin alleges. It is only I, as the observer, who says this. On the other hand, it is my experience that tells about the miracle that art brings with it. It is what art can mean to me, and with what art can do to human beings. It tells of how art can be a holy rite of affection, devotion, and love.
It is possible that Tage Lundin is unaware of the inviolable and is what I think I see, imagine, and feel. But nonetheless it is the movements of his hands that reveal things to me and give me insight and feeling.

This is the greatest purpose of art maybe, sometimes through nature as a source of inspiration there is a hint of the innermost and most important. Life itself is a great miracle, and sometimes it is only the artist who can relate that miracle for us.

by Stig Åke Stålnacke
International Art Critical Association IACA


Purifying Perception

Tage Lundin, a son of Lapland, is deeply rooted in his environment. If you listen to his paintings, you will hear the sound of his music. You hear the suggestive chant of the shaman's "jojk". The jojk seems to be the basis for his canvases. It is precisely that, that makes him interesting.
It makes it possible to enter into his silent but sometimes turbulent landscape. It is a world that is distinguished by boiling intellectuality, characterized by a concerned person. It is then you can take part in the strange magic of his art. You will be enthralled by the miracle found in Tage Lundin's Purification. You will experince the purification of vision as you would on a jaunt in Lapland's wilderness.

Hans Janstad IACA