Elizabeth Peyton...

The paintings of Elizabeth Peyton include

portraits of friends, family, personal heroes,

and fleeting passions.

Peyton quickly became a voice in the return to figurative

contemporary painting in the 1990's with her portraits of

Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher. The portraits mixed

realism and conceptualism and referenced nineteenth-century

modernist painters like Eduard Manet and John Singer Sargent

(one of my all-time favorites). David Hockney and Andy Warhol

are also obvious strong influences.

The colors are often brilliant and the lines sharp —
but there is always something quietly seductive
about her paintings.
In other words, they almost always
"speak" to the viewer.

Gorgeous, gorgeous color.

The graphic quality of her work always speaks to the

aesthetics of youth, fame, and creativity and defines

the culture of the late-twentieth and

early-twenty-first centuries.