TOR LUNDVALL:A Little Danger Lurking

JOSH LAWRENCE

A caped, masked specter glances furtively over its shoulder, as if caught in the act of scurrying back into dark woods. An abnormally bright and pastoral landscape is marred by a plane's falling almost unnoticed in a corner of the sky. Figures play innocently enough in a church yard, except that one, jumping rope, may be a bird or an insect.

Eerie images inhabit the canvases of Tor Lundvall, a young East Hampton artist whose atmospheric and often haunting landscapes have been growing more and more familiar to local art audiences.

The 28-year-old painter is also a musician, having recently released a CD that evokes similar mysterious qualities.

Mystical Place

Tucked away in Northwest Woods, Mr. Lundvall's studio hardly seems an incubator for the kind of work he generates. In fact, his studio for the past six years has been the living room of a contemporary house he rents.

Looking at the painter's work, however, a visitor quickly realizes that the exterior world is only a setting. The painter's real world lies inside, at some distant checkpoint between dream and reality, a mystical area on which Mr. Lundvall thrives.

"I use the landscape as sort of a playing field," he said. "The landscape may look serene and calm, but there's always a little danger lurking, ready to destroy the innocence."

Out Of Shadow

Whether it's a wraith-like apparition of a girl peering from behind trees or simply the way dead leaves swirl in the wind, each painting has this kind of tension.

"A lot of my imagery evolves from the tension between light and dark." Often paintings are set in the hours between dusk and nightfall and many of the images and figures seem, indeed, born out of the shadows.

The woods provide much of Mr. Lundvall's settings, leading one reviewer to describe his work as portraying the "myths and legends of Northwest Woods." Mr. Lundvall chuckles at that, since even he has a hard time explaining where his imagery comes from.

Mr. Lundvall's paintings frequently involve a number of figures who appear caught in a critical moment of a longer unfolding tale.

Telling Stories

"Everything makes sense," explained Mr. Lundvall. "There is a story, but I don't have some great plan when I start a painting."

"I like a lot of old ghost stories," said Mr. Lundvall, citing the turn-of-the-century master of the genre, M.R. James, as well as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.

He said that the rest comes, as a painting develops, from memories, childhood fears, and "strange mistakes," for example. Certain characters and images reassert themselves from painting to painting, often to his own surprise.

Lots Of Crazies

Visually, Mr. Lundvall attributes some of his inspiration to the famed Scandinavian painter Edvard Munch, as well as to the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, who also portrayed an unnatural dream-like world.

Mr. Lundvall grew up in the Ramapo Valley area of Northern New Jersey, where he developed a love for the country, but he says his artistic inclinations probably come from the Swedish side of the family.

"There were always a lot of crazy people on my father's side," he said with a laugh. "My great-grandfather was a Swedish inventor. He invented the first spring clothespin."

Mr. Lundvall, who has sketched, drawn cartoons, and played the piano from the time he was 6, decided to study art at American University in Washington, D.C. Graduating in 1992 and looking for an art-related job, he landed a job at the Muriel Karasik Gallery in Southampton.

First Show

Taking other odd jobs and seeking a gallery for his work, Mr. Lundvall eventually met Zina Glazebrook, the owner of the East Hampton interior-design store Inside Out. Intrigued, she hung a large collection of the artist's paintings at the store.

"She was great," said Mr. Lundvall. "She was such a saleswoman, and she helped me sell a lot of work."

Over the next year, the artist exhibited at several other galleries here, including Renee Foutouhi Fine Art East and the Ann Harper Gallery.

It was at the end of 1994, however, that Mr. Lundvall found a relatively steady home for his work - at the Millennium Gallery in East Hampton Village - when its director, Jon-Henri Bonnard, took an instant liking to the work.

"I have to give him credit. He was the first guy out here that really believed in my stuff and pushed my stuff," said the painter. Since then, he has exhibited in nine group shows at Millennium.

Mr. Lundvall also recently had a show at the Grenning Gallery in SoHo, which plans to relocate to Sag Harbor this spring. He is readying another show there that will open on July 4.

Through gallery exhibits, private sales, and side projects, Mr. Lundvall has been able to support himself through his art. "It's risky, but I have been able to make enough and save enough to paint full time," he said. "If I worked a 9 to 5, I'd probably go crazy."

"Ambient Music"

Although music takes a back seat to painting, Mr. Lundvall applies the same creativity when it comes to producing music. One bedroom of his house acts as a warehouse for paintings, the other, a small room, serves as a home studio. It is crammed with electronics, from synthesizers to mixing boards.

Much of what evolves in the studio is in the "ambient-music" vein of artists like Brian Eno. Mr. Lundvall has filled tapes with dreamy synthesizer-driven soundtracks that could easily accompany his paintings.

He collaborated with a younger brother, Kurt Lundvall, last year on a CD titled "Passing Through Alone." Though the CD is more structured and pop-oriented than Mr. Lundvall's own experiments, its 11 tracks, with titles such as "Ghost Years," "Cloaked," "Grey Sunday," and "Poison Symbols," also evoke the atmosphere and imagery of Mr. Lundvall's paintings. The ethereal-sounding "Raven Eyes" could be a narrative for one of his landscapes.

Though "Passing Through Alone," was made pretty much "to have a stack of CDs," and to sell at his art exhibits, Mr. Lundvall has worked recently on a more serious musical project with Tony Wakeford, a British independent artist who is known for his electronic style.

Album Covers

Mr. Lundvall has done a number of album covers for Mr. Wakeford's recording group Sol Invictus. In 1993, he also did the cover for the reissued boxed set of Miles Davis's Blue Note and Capital Records recordings, and Bob Berg, a Springs-based jazz saxophonist who used to play with Mr. Davis, had Mr. Lundvall do the cover for his "Riddles" CD in 1994.

Mr. Lundvall enjoys these side projects. Several years ago, he provided 24 drawings to illustrate a book of poetry by Mr. Wakeford. He has even been approached about writing a children's book of his own, although that made the artist smirk.

"I don't know," he said. "It might come out twisted. It would probably give them nightmares."