Lande's End

Erotic painter Stacy Lande weaves a seductive web of mythology, classical artistry, and good, old-fashioned sin into her work. Hope Urban is just one of many innocent flies.

The paintings of Stacy Lande stand as a record of time and place. From 1990 to the present, Lande has documented the performers, artists, and raconteurs of the Silverlake district of Los Angeles, rendering 95 paintings in the multi-layered style of old masters such as Titian and Velasquez. Of course, Lande has modified the approach: while she still uses many thin layers of glaze to create the lusciousm luminescent skin of hersubjects, Lande executes her paintings in acrylics, not oils. "The scent of oils makes me physically ill", she explains.

Lande further exploits the picture plane by housing her large-scale paintings in found objects such as cast-off drawers and window and doorframes that she has gilded. She enhances the image additionally by affixing glitter, rhinestones, and sequins to the surface, in a nod to Picasso's weaving of chair caning in his paintings to add dimension. The effect, combined with the many layers of glaze, is akin to holograghic images of Jesus and the various saints-- whose colors and dimensions change as you move around them-- which are common sights in the heavily Latin neighborhood of Silverlake.

In an essay the artist wrote in her new book, THE RED BOX: THe Phantasma-Allegorical Portraits of Stacy Lande, she acknowledges the extreme influence of one book, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture. Authored by Bram Dijkstra, the book examines women's depictions in paintings from the turn of the 20th century. Dijkstra writes that the cult of invalidism, which afforded the most sickly looking women the highest degree of virtuosity (today's supermodel anyone?) soon gave way to the cult of sleep and , later, death. As feminists' voices grew louder in 1900, images of women changed correspondingly ; the weak and frail "household nuns" became strength sapping vampires, preying on men with their fiendish sexual needs.

Fascinated from an early age by films like CABARET and ultra decadent and theatrical women like Marlene Dietrich in THE BLUE ANGEL, Lande's women (and men) are unabashed in their sexuality. The artist says, "I felt a feverish need to document all the people we know__ a time and a place in history, like Weimar, Berlin, Montmartre, or Warhol's Factory. I paint my subjects with the hope that they will have a powerful psychic, sexual 'charge' for the viewer. Cramped by the strict verticality y of their frames, Lande's subjects create a nervous tension in the viewer that is further enhanced by their underlit, otherworldly quality.

Drawing from the deep well of mythology, as well as racial, class, and sexual politics from throughout history, Lande's subjects, in poses of strength and sexuality, are an anathema to images from popular culture. And, like the artist's self-portrait on the book's cover as Pandora unleashing evils into the world, these paintings literally fly from the pages deep in to the viewer's psyche. Unlike Pandora's contributions, we are glad they are free.