Stacy Lande
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Stacy Lande is a contemporary lowbrow painter. She paints in a style that evokes classical realism, and her themes are based on mythology and allegory. Influenced by the old masters and Victorian painters, she depicts contemporary local personalities as archetypal figures.
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[edit] Biography
Stacy Lande was born in Granada Hills, in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California. From an early age she took pride in both stage performance and her art. As a youngster she would regularly stage variety shows on her family’s front porch. This performance element would set a course for her future work.
In the late 1970s she was exposed to the explosion of punk rock, via seminal bands such as the Weirdos, Dead Boys, Stooges and the Ramones. Her course was changed forever through this introduction to the “underground”.
Formally trained in art at California State University, Northridge, Stacy refers to her years in school as being force fed conceptualism and abstract expressionism, this coming at a time when she was more attracted to German Expressionism and Symbolist painters like Gustav Klimt and Franz von Stuck. She also loved the garish performers of the Toulouse Lautrec era and expressionistic films like Nosferatu and Eraserhead.
After graduation from art school Lande knew she wanted to capture what she saw when watching punk and expressionistic cinema vis a vis the classical painting styles which had always attracted her. A move to Silverlake, California, an infamous underground artist area in Los Angeles, brought her closer to the final jump. She began doing performance art at clubs like Sin-a-Matic and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). The many musicians and performance artists she was introduced to became the inspiration for her work.
Another very seminal moment for Stacy was her introduction to a book called Idols of Perversity, by Bram Dijkstra; which examined the fin de siecle culture of the nineteenth century. It featured collections of paintings, all done by men, which bore fearful portrayals of allegorical women and “vamps” who sucked the life blood out of men. Once inspired by this work, she knew that she had to inject the people she knew into these roles.
Stacy has painted more than 120 portraits of both men and women in deified and dramatic light. Her paintings are part fantasy and part flesh, intensified with elements of the theatrical, preternatural, and the mythological past, then polished and presented with the modern day presences of her friends, to paraphrase author Sherri Cullison. In her book Vicious, Delicious and Ambitious (Schiffer press 2002) Cullision goes on to state that Lande “creates demons and she gods, hinting at both their ‘phantastical’ pasts and immortual futures.”
Stacy Lande’s work has been featured in various magazines, including Juxtapoz, Juxtapoz Erotica, Detour magazine, and Petersen’s Hot Rod Deluxe, as well as in the film Gone in Sixty Seconds" (2000 film) with Angelina Jolie and Nicholas Cage. She has been interviewed on National Public Radio's Airtalk with Larry Mantle. In addition to her own book The Red Box, with scholarly contributions from artists Robert Williams and Frank Kozik (Last Gasp Press, 2000) Lande’s work is also included in lowbrow compilations Vicious, Delicious and Ambitious, and Weirdo Deluxe, by Matt Dukes Jordan (Chronicle Books, 2005). Her work has been seen in solo and group shows in Billy Shire’s La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles, and Copro/Nason and Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station. Her work appears in collections in Japan, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and England.
[edit] Books
- Stacy Lande. (1999) The Red Box, The Phantasma Allegorical Portraits of Stacy Lande. ISBN 0-86719-500-2
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- Published by Last Gasp Press, San Francisco, CA.
- Matt Dukes Jordan. (2005) Weirdo Deluxe: The Wild World of Pop Surrealism and Lowbrow Art. ISBN 0-8118-4241-X
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- Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA.
- Sherri Cullison. (2002) Vicious, Delicious, and Ambitious: 20th Century Women Artists. ISBN 0-76431-634-6
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- Published by Schiffer Press, Atglen, PA.
[edit] Gallery
 "Andromeda" by Stacy Lande. 1997, acrylic on wood. |
 Billy Shire, Stacy Lande and "The Three Graces" at La Luz de Jesus gallery. |
