Feelings on canvas
Swedish artist Ragnhild Lunden describes painting as a process of downloading her feelings. It is a spontaneous action, so utterly uninhibited that Lunden is not even restricted by the need for brushes. She simply paints – with her hands, a kitchen knife, whatever – and the painting comes to life. They are on display at Courtyard Gallery and Café through Nov. 20. Rajeev Nair met her
Photographs: Prashanth Mukundan
In the beginning, a cluster of faces stare onto your canvas. Your teachers, your acquaintances, your critics, you… And then, slowly, one by one they leave the room. It is you and the canvas, and then you too bid good-bye. There remains only the core artist in you, stripped off your egocentricities… and you paint. It is a magical moment.
Ragnhild Lunden realised that magic very early in life. The Swedish artist has discovered that painting, as an expression, is ultimately a communication between the artist and the canvas through various media. The process has a brutal honesty, which strips her inner turmoil out in the open. It is a paradox of sorts — a feeling of detached involvement, the ability to see one’s own works from a third person’s perspective.
Lunden says she likes what she sees in her works. Her paintings that hang on the wall in front of her are exactly the sort she would want to paint, and she is proud of them.
Though she tries to externalise the experience of painting, Lunden’s works bear an intense personal stamp. That could be because she regards the process of painting as a download of her feelings. “I am a very lively person,” she says. “When I am in pain or when I am happy, every thing is in extremes. It then feels nice to paint, to get it all out, all my feelings, all that I think and experience…”
However, that is a very organic process. She could flit from one feeling to the other, and the mixed emotions do leave an impression on the final work. That calls for a lot of instantaneous moments of creativity. Yes, Lunden agrees, her works are spurred by the moment.
She had discovered the artist in her when she was a child, a hyper-kid who, according to her teachers, would settle down if given some paper and pens.
It was not possible for her to chase her artistic interests as a career initially because her father had died when she was very young. “I needed to have, what you call, ‘real education,’” says the lady. So she went on to become a dentist and attempted a doctorate in dental research. A little into the intensive medial research and Lunden realised that her true calling was in fine arts. But that stint as researcher has helped her as an artist, says Lunden. “It helps you seek solutions, answers…”
There are so many interesting asides to this lady, who attends all her exhibitions with the “Horus eye.” She paints, in black, a representation of the Egyptian mythological figure, Horus, who is believed to have been committed to peace. Lunden wears the Horus eye to the left; according to the myth, Horus could paralyse others with his left eye.
Peace is the message that Lunden too upholds. Currently, she is working on an installation in Australia that addresses world peace.
The Egyptian connection runs deeper still. Having spent a few years in the country, she took a fancy for hieroglyphics, studied them extensively, and today reinterprets them in her paintings. Abstract expressionism thus meets hieroglyphic interpretation in the works of Lunden.
“I like the beauty of their lines, and their form. I know what they mean and I feel very free working on them,” she says. Hieroglyphics have a universal quality – some forms are truly basic, which helps in enhancing a universal appeal for her works.
The organic evolution that characterises her paintings also spills on to her work techniques. She is not limited to express herself with brushes; she dabs the paint with whatever suits her fancy — a cloth, a kitchen knife, her hands…
That sense of “untidiness, the loose edges,” if you may, represents the evolving and personalised feel of the artist.
Lunden feels that paintings must reach out to other people, wherein the viewer should perhaps discover a slice of his own life, his own inner self in the painting. It is a medium that communicates to every one, and serves as a basic art from that could be common to all humanity.
Largely self-taught, Lunden sees a gradual evolution in her style. “My early pictures were very dark but the recent ones are white. It is difficult to explain why. Many things have happened to me, and perhaps, I have learned better to handle colours. When you have many years of experience, painting layers and layers, you become free with colours.”
There are several points of continuity in her works — the symbolic languages, the geometric shapes, the figurative forms… and then there are visible proofs of the artist at work: Hand drawings, painted-overs, the skeletal sketches, the canvas patches…
In that diversity wells up the inner expressions of a woman, who only wants the world and its peoples to be at peace with themselves.
