Elizabeth Peyton

The portraiture of Elizabeth Peyton is distinctive in style; focusing mainly on iconic celebrities; often men. Her first well known series of portraits were of Kurt Cobain. Peyton is interested in the cult of celebrity of her time; and collects images from magazines to work from. Her work was very much inspired by the public domain. The painting technique is lovingly rendered, as though she has a devotion to her subjects. Peyton went on to paint political leaders, actors, and her boyfriends in this same way; her admiration for them is evident through the way that she paints them. 

I am starting to look into painting myself now, and my paintings of students have an element of portraiture painting about them. Although my most recent work depicted students being sick and acting drunkenly; feedback was that I had painted them in a loving, caring way; as though I was obsessively drawing it from the original photograph in places; similar to how Peyton does. I like this idea of painting potentially negative scenes in an attractive way; so that they have the aesthetic qualities of portraiture, but the content of something slightly more negative and dystopian. 

Peyton works with images from public domain; working with collective imagery – in that the subjects are iconic, as well as the original images; through being repeatedly printed in magazines and posters. I also draw imagery from similar sources. I have used journalist's images from newspaper articles in a lot of the Carnage bar crawl work I have produced. I like mediating imagery that might have once been familiar to an audience; they may have seen the original images in newspapers that I have worked from. I have appropriated them so they may still seem familiar, or other viewers may not realise. The 'carnage' t-shirt that features in a lot of my recent work is an item of clothing that is identifiable to students nationwide: it is the ticket itself to the biggest annual bar crawl, and looks the same year-on-year. As I am interested in the shared experiences of my student generation; I like that student viewers of my work will instantly recognise which event the work is about, and most likely have their own personal memories of it. Yet someone not in this collective; an older/younger person might not be familiar with it, and would just associate the work with youth generally from an outside perspective.

I want to experiment more with painting; exploring how brush marks, light and focus can create an atmosphere. This might help the viewer fill in the narrative, as I have started to leave more of the image blank.