Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Joy Peyton (born 1965) is an American contemporary artist working primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Best known for figures from her own life and those beyond it, including close friends, historical personae, and icons of contemporary culture, Peyton's portraits have regularly featured artists, writers, musicians, and actors. Early life and education Born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1965 as the youngest of five children, Peyton began drawing and painting people at a young age. Between 1984 and 1987, she studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Work Peyton's artwork, mainly figurative, can be characterized by a coupling of understatement and intensity, depicting subjects from her own life and beyond with both startling immediacy and her signature richly modulated surfaces. Peyton draws much inspiration from the creative work of historical figures like Gustave Flaubert and John Singer Sargent, and she has expressed that she is part of a lineage of artists and writers like Balzac, Camille Claudel, Delacroix, Isa Genzken, Giorgione, Georgia O'Keeffe, etc. who look at subjects and portray them with an economy of expression to unite passive sensation with emotion. Peyton works from both life and photography, generally using painting, drawing, or printmaking, and often exploring successive degrees of removal from her source material, such as in her paintings of Camille Claudel's sculptures in which Peyton creates paintings of photographs of sculptures. In her interview with Frieze magazine, Peyton expressed that when she chooses to paint from another artist's work, it allows her to explore "harder-to-reach things inside herself" because the composition is already decided. In another manner of reworking, Peyton will revisit an image that she has previously used, cropping it in different dimensions and thus altering the amount of context given. This manipulation of context is significant to Peyton because of its effect on the feelings of proximity and intimacy.