A red-lipped young man slouches in a verdant garden in Elizabeth Peyton’s 1996 painting, Mendips, 1963, holding a baby dressed in white. At first glance, the pale, lithe man seems an interchangeable member of the chorus of beautiful young people Peyton painted in the 1990s, a roster that included friends, lovers, historical figures, and celebrities. However, figural clues (from the man’s bowl cut, to the infant in his arms), along with the work’s title, reveal the specificity of Peyton’s vision: a photograph of John Lennon at his family home, Mendips, in Liverpool, holding his infant son, Julian, born in 1963. Painted the year after Peyton was featured at the Venice Biennale in 1995, Mendips, 1963, presents the compositional elements and wider themes that brought her renown as a figural artist in the 1990s, with enchanting portraits that engage cultural ideals of fame, artistry, and intimacy.

 

Photographs have long been a source of inspiration for Peyton; recounting her childhood, she says, “I drew a lot and put a lot of pictures of people up on the wall.”ⁱ By drawing from photographs, Peyton engages a long-standing question of modern art, from the Impressionists onwards, of the relationship between painting and photography. Gerhard Richter’s photo paintings stand as a contemporary forebear to Peyton’s method. But where artists like Richter use photography as a tool against subjectivity and sentimentality, Peyton is forthcoming in her love and personal admiration for her painted subjects.ⁱⁱ  Rather than focusing on the materiality of the photograph itself, she hones in on the personality of the subject, and “at some point,” she says, “the photo’s got to get lost.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

With Mendips, 1963, the original photograph of John and Julian “gets lost” through Peyton’s painterly interventions. She alters the composition in slight, yet significant ways, tilting Lennon, who stands upright in the photograph, on a diagonal, and cropping the canvas closer to his body, which encourages a more intimate relationship between figure and viewer. Peyton also trades in the photographer’s black and white for a vibrant palette of spring greens, and the photograph’s realistic precision gives way to rounded, swishing brushstrokes and an abstracted background. Lennon’s face grows angular, and his features more stylized; he averts his gaze, in demure contrast to his photographed self. Peyton paints his berry-red lips parted and full, almost like a Pre-Raphaelite model’s. Her brushstrokes seem to transform the suburban Liverpool setting of Mendips, 1963 into a mythical English garden.  

 

The romanticism of this act is intentional; as Caroline Roux wrote in 2013, “Elizabeth’s pictures are evocations rather than likenesses, and they are romantic. She absorbs her sitter’s qualities, mingles them with her own particular take (love, admiration, distant respect) and translates this into an image.”^iv In the case of Mendips, 1963, Peyton takes on the iconic visage of one of the 20^th century’s most famous musicians, but presents him in an unfamiliar light. Instead of seeing John Lennon, the singer, guitarist, and activist, we see John Lennon, the new father. It is an unexpectedly private moment, from a decidedly public life, and it is the surprising intimacy of such an image that placed Peyton’s work at the vanguard of the return to figuration in painting in the 1990s.

 

Peyton likes to paint portraits of other artists who inspire her, and musicians like Lennon are among her favorites. For Peyton, it does not matter if she knows her subject personally, or only through their music, or a photograph.^v As she explained in an interview for Index in 2000, music, like art, can collapse time and accelerate intimacy. There is a shared human emotion at the root of music that allows a musician’s words or melodies to become those of the listener’s, in a uniquely close, and personal way. She said: “It's like John Lennon [singing], you hear his breath. And you can have it. And if you really love that person, then you take them into your life and you make it better with them…It's a beautiful thing when a collapse occurs between our own personal needs and what's in the air.”^vi

 

 

ⁱ Elizabeth Peyton, quoted in “Raising Creative Kids: An Interview With Elizabeth Peyton,” Walker Art Center, Mar. 31, 2009, online.

ⁱⁱ Jerry Saltz, “Elizabeth II,” New York Magazine, May 7, 2008, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Peyton, quoted in Rob Pruitt and Steve Lafreniere, “Elizabeth Peyton,” Index Magazine, 2000, online.

^iv Caroline Roux, “Elizabeth Peyton: The Exceptional Portrait Painter,” The Gentlewoman, no. 8, Autumn/Winter 2013, online.

^v Peyton, quoted in Steve Lafreniere, “A Conversation with the Artist,” Elizabeth Peyton, New York, 2005, p. 16.

^vi Peyton, quoted in Pruitt and Lafreniere.