PAINT/PRINT Brief: Process To Image Week 4. Day 4. Artist Research

Elizabeth Joy Peyton (b.1965 American)

Elizabeth Peyton is a portrait, still life and landscape artist. Her portraits are of friends, icons, heroes and inspirational people she admires such as artists, actors, dancers, musicians, writers, politicians and activists. She paints from found images, photographs, imagination and literature. 

Some of her portraits look unfinished, with a variety of strong and concise brushstrokes juxtaposed against gentle marks and sparse areas with negative spaces.  She can also show an opposite effect by portraying beautiful gestural marks, and layers of paint.

I also like how the people she paints are seated close to the foreground, and how they sit in causal positions, some sluggish, or heads bent forward. Often their eyes look glazed, staring into the distance, as if in a pensive mood.  I am drawn to them because they are contemporary, and there is an expressive human individuality, with themes of beauty and love in her work.

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