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Make
Eye Contact Norman
Lundin tolerates no haphazard or accidental mark in his works. He seeks
a total visibility that hides nothing in the artifice of the art making.
A self-proclaimed and -defined “eye-first” painter, Lundin has formed
and evolved his powerful compositional intelligence from a close scrutiny
of the world. Speaking eloquently in his teaching and writings of the
necessity to respond visually, he has created an oeuvre over the past
forty-five years that demands we look closer, that we make eye contact. I
have known Lundin’s work for over thirty years now, and with each new
drawing and painting that I encounter, I experience afresh its isolated,
self-absorbed interiority. Instinctively, I virtually draw my jacket closer
around my body against the cold clarity of the looking as I explore the
spaces inside Lundin’s works. On finding a small patch of warm light,
my eyes circle and tease every perceptible degree of heat from the moment.
Inward-looking, solitary, often austere, his works continually challenge
and reward intimate scrutiny. And so I return to them to revel in the
gratifications they afford a roaming eye that finds fulfillment not in
discovered narrative or emotion, but in the absolute pleasures of line,
tone, and chiaroscuro. Norman
Lundin has an almost Proustian relationship to memory and the working
spaces that an artist’s life occupies. He has used the ordinary objects
that come to populate an artist’s studio and the life models who animate
the space to explore the formal rendering of the fall of sunlight inside
that spare place. In drawings and paintings that participate in the rich
continuum of the American realist and still-life tradition, Lundin has
crafted a formula for working that exploits vernacular architecture and
objects to structure situations for the loving exploration of the artist’s
craft. His is an emblematic world of tin cans and paint rags, solitary
coffee cups and windowsills, scrubbed tabletops and worn walls, called
forth without any of the telling clutter that makes the studio a mirror
of the artist’s life and process—a place of signifiers and atmospheres. Lundin
stopped rendering images of his own working space over the years. He came
to favor a more conceptually pure and malleable one in which the individual
components would serve the formal relationships of art making, not biography.
His subjects are never capricious or indifferently composed. Lundin exercises
the same rigor in constructing the fictions that are his rooms as he does
in their meticulous crafting, so that they look like the world we live
in, and yet not. He constructs his works from the accumulated image fragments
of experienced places, in the context of a complex syntax of sensory perception
that provides at times stoic, alternately sybaritic renderings of three-dimensional
form animated by light. From the artifice of a charcoal drawing of a nude
tapped to a the studio wall to a recent oil painting of a misty invented
landscape seen through steel casement windows, the works have taken on
an almost elegiac silence—or is it airlessness?—that pervades the perfect
rendering. These
are unheated rooms for working at the artist’s craft. Their orderly spaces
are warmed only by the occasional snippet of bright color and streams
of light that fall across the space, suggesting all the variants in hue
and warmth from dawn to dusk. Lundin’s observations of the path of light
across space resonate palpably for the viewer and conflate experience
with representation. It is not verisimilitude in the sense of nineteenth-century
trompe l’oeil still life painting that one finds in Lundin’s works, but
rather the verity of experience presented through the traditional
means of the artist’s rendering. Just as Blake metaphorically saw the universe in a grain of sand, Lundin has found his universe in the simple cans and bottles arranged on the tables of a sun-streaked studio. Caprices of observation and invention, Lundin’s work offers the viewer a world of total invention based in the artist’s history and craft and suggests an utter honesty and clarity. The artifice of his paintings and drawings is built on his consummate technique and surfaces, which can both mirror and seduce the world. Color, form, and surface engage the eye and then the mind with an endless reverie of light, shadow, and reflection. With no technical limitations to impede the grace and accomplishment that fills these works, today Lundin is finding fresh ground to explore inside his studio paradigm, challenging us once more to see, and to discover in the seeing a more complex and resonant world around us. Bruce Guenther Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art |