Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965, Danbury, Connecticut) is an American artist best known for her intimate portraiture of cultural figures, friends, historical personages, and still life subjects. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Peyton came to prominence in the 1990s for her paintings, drawings, and later prints, which combine a sensitivity to emotional tone with a refined, delicate handling of form. Her work draws on both art historical sources and popular culture.

Printmaking has long been an important part of Peyton’s artistic practice. She works in various techniques including monotype, etching, woodcut, and notably linocut. Her linocuts often appear in limited editions, hand-signed and numbered, made on fine papers (e.g. Somerset paper, Japan paper, Magnani Pescia). In interviews, Peyton has described prints as for her something like a “foreword”—that is, a place where she works ideas out, where energy, immediacy, and experimentation can happen more swiftly than in painting. Her linocuts display characteristic features: bold, clean contours; strong contrast between uninked and inked surfaces; and often simplified yet expressive line. Subtle colours or monochrome tones are used to emphasize mood or the emotional presence of the subject.

Peyton’s linocut portraits concentrate on figures who carry personal, historical, or cultural weight, musicians, writers, activists, lovers, as well as self-portraits. Works such as Lou Reed + Rachel (2017) and Frederick Douglass (2023) show how she uses linocut’s sharp edges and limited tones to lend dignity, presence, and even quiet intensity to her subjects. Because of the reduction in detail inherent in relief techniques, much is expressed through silhouette, line, and contrast: posture, gaze, the negative space of the uncarved parts as much as the carved. These works often feel both immediate and formal: familiar yet distanced, personal yet iconic.