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Elizabeth Peyton

—  I wouldn’t say it’s a new direction. It seemed important to include the linocuts because a different thing can happen in them than in a painting, it’s a different kind of expression. I’ve been making prints for a long time, monotypes and etchings and the odd woodcut. I like about prints that you have to make it all happen in one go. I don’t work on one piece for a long time, an afternoon usually. I tend to try things out. I would say that, historically, prints have typically been the afterword to a work. But for me it’s a foreword. Often I’ll make a work after something I make in the print studio.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  One of the prints at Sadie Coles HQ is of the musician Elias Bender Rønnenfelt. When I make work about him, it seems like I’ve been looking at him for six months, but then we go to the print studio and I make something in two hours. Whereas sometimes I’ll try and paint him and really struggle. Even though the print might only have taken two hours, it took all that previous time to get to the point.

 

I also really want to accomplish something each time I am in the print studio. Sometimes when I’m in the print studio I project my own negative thoughts onto everyone who is working there. When I’m on my own, I sometimes think to myself, ‘Why am I painting my dog? Can’t I get it together?’ But when I’m printing, I’ll scramble to make it happen. Whereas in the studio I might have stepped back from it and let it sit.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  I even find myself attempting to replicate that anxiety when I’m painting in order to make myself finish something I’ve been working on for a long time.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  No, painting is different. It can be many accumulated quick moments, or happen over a long time, but the difference is that the surface is so important to a painting. In printmaking, the surface is flat. With a painting, the weight of the surface has to be right. It’s not about failure so much as it’s about letting the painting tell you what it needs. Just watching it, watching everything that’s happening in it. A painting takes place over time, so it has many influences coming into it.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, though paintings can fail because you’ve added too much – painting can also be a process of taking away. For a long time – and I still do this occasionally – I made paintings by putting on the paint and taking it off, leaving a little bit. I was trying to get away from literally descriptive things, towards a barer, emptier space.

 

Now, I’m putting things back in. The still life of flowers Carte d’Embarquement (Flowers) was the first painting I made for the show. I was listening to a lot of Philip Glass, his piano études. He was once quoted in Tim Page’s 1993 article Music in 12 Parts as saying that having ‘taken everything out with my early works … it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put back in’. That’s just what I wanted. I felt like I was really struggling with that. Wanting to use paint, but having such a hard time getting away from the literalness of it sometimes.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  When I was younger I painted on found glass. I really loved the fast surface, as paint doesn’t absorb into glass. Now I use a wood panel that I put layer after layer of gesso on, sanding in between until it’s like glass…which similarly to the glass lets me have the kind of movement I want in my work.

 

In a sense, making the support is the first part of the painting. Sometimes I’m thinking forward: I see lines building up when I’m using the taping knife, because naturally it’s not the most perfect surface. They can guide the composition.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  The thing is the thing.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, which relates back to movement. That record of figuring it out is an exciting part of the painting. It’s also so challenging, to figure it out from nothing.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  I’ll often use both for a single portrait. I’ll work from life and then work from photos, and then maybe from memory or even other photos. Life tends to get a little literal. I like the magical things that come from my own bad photography, or from photos found on the internet. They might contain something that you would never see in real life.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, like a blurring or a heightening of colour, some degeneration. I get really excited about things like that.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  It’s very exposing for me too. By asking someone to sit for me I’m saying that I really want to be with you, spend some time with you, get to know you, look at you. It’s a very particular kind of attention. It makes me feel vulnerable, but it’s so tender. I often think that people don’t really know what other people look like. People generalise even the people they know so well. The shorthand of the person with the tie, and the coloured hair, and stuff. But they don’t really see. The person can look so different.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  I don’t really think about genre. I mean, I never thought about portraiture much. The work just has to function as a picture.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  I don’t have synaesthesia exactly. I do have this voice thing, when a portrait I’m doing is getting close to really feeling like the person, I can hear their voice. Like I can hear you talking, it just happens.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Whether consciously or not, I am aware that everything I bring into my home could potentially be part of the picture.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  I recently went to see the series of which The Rose Bower is a part by Burne-Jones, which was based on Tennyson’s The Sleeping Beauty. My painting is after the first picture in the series The Briar Wood. I’d only seen them on the internet before that.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  I want to get close to it, I want to know how it works. In this case, too, I’d been thinking a lot about knights, and Tristan from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. This came together with something in my mind, something I really wanted to see. I was thinking about bands and the way young men are together. The way they love each other – that is very much a part of this painting. I’ve never let that out of my mouth before. But it’s something I thought about quite a lot.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes. They’re tired. They trust each other. They’re in the middle of nowhere. But they have each other.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, at the beginning more so. Proust was a revelation to me when I was young, his understanding at the end of À la recherche…, that it’s all present, everything is continual.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, but one could say Wagner’s quite edgy. Not to be defensive about classical music, but it’s painful and it’s raw.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, but I’m not the first to say that. Baudelaire said that the ideal artist is timeless. Like the Titian painting in the Frick, Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap, or Giorgione’s Portrait of a Young Man in the Staatliche… I’ve made copies of both those paintings, actually. These things contain the humanity of the relationship between two people in a room. If you get to the right place in art, it’s all alive – or it’s alive forever.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, it’s so interesting. But it’s not just the physical changes. Recently I was re-photographing stills from Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig (1972). I made a lot of pictures from that film about King Ludwig II, Wagner’s patron when I was 20 or 21. At that age I didn’t want to know anything about Wagner at all, but now I want to know everything about Wagner. So I’m appreciating Ludwig in a different way.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Visconti, clearly. I think I’m attracted to filmmakers like François Truffaut who can make an anecdotal narrative film that somehow filters its time through its subject.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, like in The Revenant. It’s so poetic and beautiful, but also powerfully political.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  It’s always been very natural rather than theoretical, though of course I am aware of that history. I think that if I was a man my pictures would be more highly regarded as portraits, and I would be questioned less about my ‘obsessiveness’. It is considered normal that a man should paint talented and successful people to whom he is attracted! There’s a higher ideal in that. My work is pretty ‘feminine’ in the sense that it’s emotional, it’s feeling.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  It used to be much higher, because I would paint a lot more. But the failure rate is still significant.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes, that was maybe the first thing. When I was younger, I would make pictures based on what I was reading, pictures of things that didn’t exist. I still feel that way about the pictures I make. Something that doesn’t exist and is missing and so I want to make it.

 

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Elizabeth Peyton

—  Yes absolutely. Yesterday I saw the Eugène Delacroix show at the National Gallery and I thought… I mean, I don’t want to elevate myself to that. But I feel very comfortable with the way he went about painting. I feel in the family of, or I want to be in the family of, Delacroix, van Dyck, Manet, Sargent, Gustave Moreau. I am very grateful that I can do this, but also feel like it’s a responsibility. There’s the duty to reflect on what’s in my time, be it old or new.