07.09.06
My lust for Elizabeth Peyton
Looking at an Elizabeth Peyton painting is like eating candy with your eyes. It looks like she paints with melted “Jolly Ranchers.” I am in total lust with the surfaces of her paintings, and I think that she and many other are in lust with the subjects that she paints. Most things about her work are highly addictive. They are like the gourmet versions of hard candy and tabloid press put together. The first painting of hers I saw was of Liam from the English band Oasis. It did not look like any other painting I had seen. It was at the St. Louis Art Museum. The colors, for lack of a better word, seemed perfect. I was drawn into this little painting and it haunted me for a long time. It did not look like other paintings, and it was so small in comparison to the giant Anselm Kiefer I had just seen in the other room.
I have been on a Peyton kick for some time now. I search out her works, I read gallery guides and whenever I visit a new museum I try to find them. I want to devour each one, or just lick them once or twice to see how they taste. I am addicted to the sugar high my eyes receive after looking at each one. The subjects are normally as saccharine filled as the paint. Not that the Prince of England is totally saccharine filled, but Peyton’s treatment of the subject is. Even though they are so small they carry such weight and power on a wall. A painting hundreds of times bigger is normally dwarfed in power by a regular panel of hers. A good example is at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Each time I go into the contemporary room I look for her one little painting, some person’s backside walking away, and compare it to everything else in terms of strength. Her paintings are so drippy with sweets I almost don’t want to look at anything else.
It is hard to reconcile the work that she is doing with the work of many of her contemporaries and influences. She is very influenced by David Hockney, but she is a far superior painter in my opinion, mostly because Hockney uses paint as a tool for a goal and Peyton transforms paint into the goal. My lust for Peyton’s work has not faded yet. I am still wrapped up in the intenseness and fluidity of her work. I am also attracted to her assertions that she wants to be like the subjects she paints. She seems to me a dreamer who by force of will, intellect, and talent, is making herself apart of a world she so desperately wants to be in. She is there for an artist like me, and I am learning the lessons she may be teaching to me. Her work is right on target. It is smart, sweet, strong, and totally addictive. Make life imitate art. Or at least one section of life given so much importance (stardom), that is really nothing more than an addiction for our world.
