Biographical notes and reflectionsI was born in Sweden in 1957. I now live in Lund, a medieval town with a university in the south of the country. At the age of 19, God made it very clear to me that I was going to be an icon-painter. From the very beginning I regarded this task as a vocation, a call for spiritual and artistic maturity to the benefit of serving the visual aspect of the Divine Revelation. After almost ten years of studies and personal deeper studies about the idiom and the painting-technology of the icon, as well as history of sacred art and the theology and the anthropology of the holy image, this has become my profession. 
Studio picture: the icon painter Lars Gerdmar at work with the reredos for Maria Magdalena Church, 1993, Lund, Sweden. I have learned to paint in the classical Russian style from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but I have also learned from the late-medieval painting-technology (Maniera Greca), as it was used by painters such as Duccio Buoninsegna, Cimabue and Giotto.
Italian colour pigments for egg tempera on panel, Terra di Siena brusciata, Lightocker The meeting with Leonid Ouspensky and with his magnificent icons in Paris, in 1981, made a great impression. And the following correspondence with him brought me deep into both the artistic and spiritual sides of the art. Ouspensky (1902-1987) is internationally recognised as one of the foremost icon-painters of this century. With his painting and his classical books The meaning of Icons (co-author: Vladimir Lossky) and Theology of the Icon; he laid the ground for the serious exercise of the Russian way of painting that we find today. Several study tours to Italy, where I have had the opportunity of closely investigating the panel-painting, as it appeared when the Latin icon was at its summit of artistic and spiritual brilliance, have resulted in further steps. Today I have developed my own technique, in which aspects of both the Russian and the Italian traditions co-operate. The classical tempera-techniques demand a lot of work at every single moment of the creative process, towards the goal of making the history-painting and the symbolic realism in the icon present, in a living and obvious way. The portrait-painting, the concentrated realism of the faces and the warm and tangible skin-painting, the abstract form in balance with the anatomy and the concrete language of the body, the colourism, the dynamics in the graphic and the light-modelling, are all integrated parts of the idiom. It is the knowledge of the inner logic and the complexity of spiritual meaning and beauty within this idiom and the personal artistic ability of expressing your own experiences of the Christian Mystery, that makes icon-painting into great art and a living expression of the Tradition. As an icon-painter belonging to the Catholic Church I perform my work in a time when the spiritual and the liturgical life in the western part of the Christian world increasingly asks for holy images, images that answer to the richness of truth, beauty and goodness, that belong to the Christian Tradition. My vocation is to paint from the heart to the hand and I try to do this as well as possible, to open the eyes of man. In this art man can find the divine presence, the respect, the love, the purity and the fervour. Here he gets the opportunity to meet the real beauty and the undisguised dignity. By the presence of holy icons before his eyes during services and prayers, he can recover the glory that is present in the depth of his being, the glory Christ was prepared to suffer for until death; the glory He has made immortal through His Resurrection. This is my own experience of both Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant services, where the icons co-operate with the spoken gospel, the prayers and the sacraments. When I paint, I do this according to what the Lord speaks about in the Gospel of St. Luke: Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and hear what you hear, and did not hear it. (Luke 10:24) The holy Image and the holy Word are one and the same. And by the visual representation of the Divine revelation through the icons in the liturgy, our eyes are blessed to the same high degree as our ears are blessed in correspondence with the readings and the verbal preaching. The icon and the image-piety in the western part of Christendom are experiencing a renaissance and this implies both a challenge and a memento to us, who have got the mission to serve this movement as icon-painters. Now that we have the historical opportunity to integrate this lost part of the Tradition into our own spiritual and liturgical life, we ought to do this with regard to both the theological and the artistic aspects. In the new Catechism of the Catholic Church we find texts about the icon and the liturgy, texts that in all respects correspond to the classical theology of the image as it was formulated at the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. It is time for the Catholic Church to go from words to action and, in practical terms, to reintroduce this central part of the common Christian Tradition into our old, as well as our new church-buildings. For the Protestant part of Christendom this question has also become important, as an expression of ecumenism. Here the icon and the theology of the image point to a way back to the roots, which were partly cut off at the time of the reformation. Thus will the holy icon more and more become the symbol-image of the common Credo, of the most essential in the Christian faith and experience. Not only adults and elderly people, but also the youngest visitors of the church: The children and the teen-agers are attracted to the icon. Priests and lay-men use to tell me about the important role the message of the icons play for the spiritual experiences and the maturity of the young generation. In this wonderful context of spiritual recognition, deeper studies and common Christian responsibility towards the strongly secularised world, I try to carry out my vocation. Let us do as people did during the Middle Ages in Sweden, Italy and France (just to mention a few countries), when the holy images still had a central place in the hearts of the believers. Let us not make the visual representation of the Divine Revelation into a small parenthesis in the spiritual and liturgical life. Let it become a manifest part of pious life, in resemblance with the Orthodox image-piety and in line with the Catholic image-culture, as it appeared during the Middle Ages. This is a vision I would like to share with people who represent the pastoral and liturgical work. The believers as well as all the spiritually homeless people around us, today have the same need of holy images, images of the Incarnation and the Redemption of the complex Christian reality, images that appeal to spiritual maturity of the believers, as well as the longing of the secularised modern man for identity and personal dignity.
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