The Paintings of Elizabeth Peyton
Elizabeth Peyton is everywhere. She's in Vogue; she's in Elle; she's in ArtForum. For a long time, I resisted writing about her just because she was so ubiquitous. I'm snooty that way -- I can't like what everybody else likes. But eventually, I succumbed to peer pressure and decided to write about Elizabeth Peyton because everybody else is.
In a sense, that's what Peyton's art is about. Giving in to pop culture, letting it sweep you away, without resistance, until you become one with it, until it seems to be all that is important.
Other critics have alternatively given Peyton one of two sources of inspiration: Warhol or Hockney. But I believe her work springs from both. She is heir to
Warhol's star-worshipping and Hockney's flat, bright brushstrokes.
The subjects of Peyton's paintings are generally famous and they are even further distanced from the common man, put on an even higher pedestal, by the sources she uses for her images -- photographs out of magazines and album covers.
Her subjects are already valorized by expert photography, and then she goes on to prettify them even further by the way she makes them appear in her canvases.
Although flattened by her near one-dimensional painting, the style in which each character emerges is always somehow better than life; brighter, shinier and "prettier." The "prettier" is key here, for Peyton makes each subject look fey, dandified and made-up, not in a mocking way, but as if to give each one the power and poise of an Oscar Wilde or Lord Byron.
These anti-macho portraits are both a comment on, and a lavish endorsement of, the media's beautification of the famous.
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