LANE ARTHUR
Lane ArthurSeptember 2009
Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction catalogs are the source material from which I create paintings of mercurial hybrid objects. These artifacts are often isolated against solid or graduated backgrounds, implying a commercial language at odds with its mysterious subject. Merging pieces from different styles and periods, I seek to invoke the eccentricity of an ingenuous collector. Ten Important Silver Candlesticks, for example, is composed from ten candlesticks, categorically united only by the catalog in which they were published. Similar to this featured piece, forced relationships occur between projects and bodies of work, exemplifying the project-to-project method that is my studio practice. Each new painting has it’s own story and it is through these apparent gaps that new and unexpected dialogues emerge. There are recurring elements, however, that bridge the work. Seventeenth century Dutch Still Life painting has played a crucial role in the long-term development of my paintings, from the underlying principles of composition to the conceptual buttress of still life as mental theater. While I am seemingly criticizing the commodity of art, I also playfully pretend the role of a collector or curator. As Frederic Jameson once stated, "A good or great parodist has to have some secret sympathy for the original, just as a great mimic has to have the capacity to put himself/herself in the place of the person imitated."