Secrets of an Armchair Stripper

Some people paint what they see; Stacy Lande paints what she knows. With a healthy appetite for art history and Victorian allegory, she's turning tales of the stripclub spotlight into myths of our time. Jamie O'Shea gets a little closer.

Tell me about the lifestyle behind your paintings.
The paintings arose out of my experimentation with performance art and go-go dancing in the early '90s and participating in the whole Silverlake (CA) performance art lifestyle. That came first and the work became a documentation of the performers I worked with; the people in the paintings are all real. I always felt we had a parallel with the Toulouse-Lautrec Moulin Rouge era and the cabaret scene of the '20s. Sort of a decadent Berlin nightclub air about us.

What prompted you to start working in this imagery?
After art school I was blocked because I didn't feel I had any experience to paint this, and I was just stuck. Then I started participating in the performance aspect of the club scene and that got things started.

You work in what seems to be a classical style.
Well, in art school I studied with teachers that taught the old masters technique and I really cut my teeth on this book, The Idols of Perversity. It's all about this Victorian obsession with voluptuous, allegorical evil women who suck the lifeblood out of men, which was really the thrust of my work in the late 19th century. What I did is take modern people I work with and plug them into these allegorical, mythological roles.

In 19th century art there was the concept of the "incubus" - where the modern day term for vampires was derived from - which were these sexual demons that appeared in dreams and sucked the life out of people and raped them. A lot of people have compared my paintings to them, that they're like these sexual demons. And I do try to take modern people and give them this psychic sexual charge like they're sort of mythological.

You're working with classical themes in a modern context.
I'm disgusted with conceptual modern 20th century art, and ever since art school I wanted to reach out and create something that would reach out and touch people who didn't necassarily have an art background. Something they could just feel. I just happen to be doing it with knowledge of the past. I also have a lot of art history background, so the work tends to be a little formal.

The work possesses a lot of emotion.
The paintings are really sentimental because they're all friends and they each document a moment in time here. I want the viewer to feel something.

What is the root of your inspiration?
My work is about the woman celebrating her pin-up-ness, it's post-feminist, it's reclaiming empowerment. All those Birkenstock, plaid shirt wearing feminists from the '70s that I grew up with made me sick.

What attracted you to the Victorian portrayals of women?
I'm not sure what the connection is or how the notion of the evil woman evolved at the end of the 19th century exactly - that's where the term "vamp" came from, vampires - but here we are 100 years later and people seem to be returning to a sort of mythological approach again, painting based on myth and archetype. For me it started as an anti-conceptualist reaction in art school.

Has being a woman affected your success at all?
I don't think it's been relevant because I despise the notion of it. Althought I've been placed in this context of "chick art" becuase it's convenient, I'm a post-feminist and I reject the idea of falling back on the convenience of being a woman. It makes me cringe and I think it's because I grew up in the Gloria Steinem Ms. '70s.

What's your take on stripping?
I love strippers; I'm an armchair stripper.

Is it demeaning or empowering?
Definitely empowering, and that's what my work is about - reveling in that sexual power.

How about pornography?
Well, it's so clinical, when I watch that I feel like I'm being reminded that it's time for my Pap smear. But with burlesque, there was so much art involved, it was just so different.

What's your philosophy behind it all?
My whole life, my feeling has been if it isn't erotic, it isn't art. Even as a little kid I was drawing these women with giant breasts, tiny waists and false eyelashes. I always just wanted to draw pin-up girls.