Contemporary Artist- Elizabeth Peyton-Imani Burke



Elizabeth Joy Peyton is known for her small and intimate self portraits. Her portrait work contains a wide variety of people from friends, celebrities, and historical figures she admires. Peyton creates these small portraits because she is very intrigued by her model facial features. She believes that facial features contain so much more than what people realize, and she proves that in her work. Peyton, born in 1965, grew up in Danbury, New York. From an early age she has always done portraits from what she can remember. She finished her schooling in Danbury and left to pursue her art career at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. There she studied from 1984 through 1987 with her Bachelors in Fine Arts. Though she continues to travel with her work, her studio practice remains in New York.

After graduating at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she had a lot of successful exhibitions. After doing multiple shows and exhibitions, her first real breakthrough was in 1998 after Parkett Magazine commissioned Peyton to create a Lithograph from some other paintings. She quickly started to take up printmaking and create prints of new work and some of her earlier work to put on display.
Peyton’s second breakthrough was her exhibit at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1993. Though it was just in a hotel room, where it was only key card accessible, she had more than fifty people come and see this collection. The collection showcased multiple pieces from her Marie Anionette, Kurt Donald Cobain, and Napoleon paintings. This showcase only lasted a few hours before it was shut down because the owner was not aware of what was going on and asked them to check out immediately.
Julian
2006
Woodblock print
4/45
My favorite piece from Elizabeth Peyton’s collection is ‘Julian’, made in 2006, woodblock print, and one edition from 45 prints. I chose this piece after researching her earlier works because I felt like this is one that doesn't really convey what she stands for. Peyton primarily works with watercolor and oil painting because it is easier to use with her style of work which is very quiet and delicate. But, in ‘Julian’, she uses very loud and bold colors in this piece. The color red dominates this image because it uses all pigments surrounding the portrait of Julian to make these certain colors. This piece of work gives you a feeling of vulnerability. The harsh and jagged yellow and orange brush strokes around the figure creates a light background. With the black etched figure singing with a standing microphone creates the feeling of the unknown instrument he is playing. The artist she picked for this print gives life to the colors chosen. In the dark figure, there are dark red highlights to give definition from the musician's button up shirt and in his skin. The color picked for his skin correlates to when you are at a concert, sometimes the lighting is chosen to what song the artist or band has chosen to play. Peyton did many exhibitions in her life, but the one collection that continues to stand out from the rest is at the MoMA. The MoMA has various works from many different artists but Elizabeth Peyton is one of the painters that is admired by many. The MoMA has, ‘Compass In Hand: Collections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawing Collection’, April 22nd 2009-January 4th 2010, Printmaking Now Collection from the year 2006, ‘Drawing from the Modern’ collection 1975-2005, and ‘Drawing Now:Eight Propositions’, 2002-2003. The MoMA has the biggest collection of work from Peyton because she is partnered with them by living in New York City.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century - Violet Larimer

Image
 Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century Summary: The Bauhaus school, was an art and design school established in Weimar Germany in the early 20th century that, according to the thesis of the documentary, defined and codified the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of art and art academia of the 20th century and into the contemporary world. The Bauhaus School was situated as an Avant Garde model to the established pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of the previously established art academy. Instead of learning a cannon and participating in rote tasks; students would learn the building blocks of art and design as a "grammar to visual language." Paired with the workshop structure of teaching, the school was an obvious break from tradition. On a more philosophical and ideological level, the students and teachers had broken down conventional power relations, with students pursuing personal projects within the school. However, despite the radical break in hierarchical structure, ...
Read more

Ryn Forquer Blogpost #4 - AI and Nightshade

Image
     Ben Zhao, a professor at The University of Chicago, has created a program called Nightshade, designed to “poison” AI image generators to stop infringement upon artists’ copyrighted work. Nightshade works by shifting pixels in artwork, confusing the technology on the work’s subject– thus making it possible for an AI generator to transform what is supposed to be an image of a dog into a picture of a cat and so on. The hope behind the creation of this tool is that enough people will use Nightshade that AI generator databases will become unable to produce accurate outputs. Creators of Nightshade include Ben Zhao, Shawn Shan, Wenxin Ding, Josephine Passananti, and Haitao Zheng– at the University of Chicago. The creation of Nightshade comes in response to repeated claims from artists that AI generators, such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, use copyrighted works in the database they draw from. So far, very few laws have addressed this issue– hence the creation ...
Read more

Blog Post #1- The Lonely Palette ep.64

Image
  I listened to an episode of the podcast, The Lonely Palette. I chose the episode about artist Barbara Kruger because I have a strong interest in feminism/activism in art. The episode gave a brief summary of her life and the impacts of her work, specifically her 1989 piece, “Your Body is a Battleground.” Kruger attributed her art style to her background in graphic design. In this piece, she mirrors the face of a woman from a 1950s magazine, half beautiful, half frightening. In bold, highlighted red text the phrase “Your body is a battleground.” Kruger made this work for a pro-choice rally march on Washington, and it blew up as a symbol for protesters across the country. This piece is so simple and yet packs a punch to the viewer. So, what makes this work so impactful? She uses specific and curated language to deliver her message to the viewer. Kruger uses language to her advantage, commenting “I think I developed language skills to deal with the threat. It’s the girl thing to do –...
Read more