Elizabeth Peyton

Art Brokerage: Elizabeth Peyton American Artist: b. 1965. She was born 1965 on Danbury, CT. Elizabeth Peyton's portraits of rock stars and other celebrities have made her one of the most-talked-about American artists of her generation. She and another New York-based contemporary artist, John Currin, have been hailed as the painters who brought figurative art that which uses the human figure as its subject matter back into fashion after a long absence. "I felt that you could see a person's time in their face especially the particular moment when they're about to become what they'll become" she told Dodie Kazanjian in Vogue about what drew her to portraiture. "They just shine, and everybody around them can feel it." Peyton grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, where her father and stepmother had a candle-making business. She was born with only two fingers on her right hand, and so she learned to draw with her left hand. In interviews, she has said that she was fascinated by celebrities even as a child, particularly the tennis and ice-skating stars of the 1970s, but her interests took a musical turn when her older sister introduced her to the seminal British punk band The Clash. "There was nothing else like that in Connecticut," she recalled in an interview with music journalist Jon Savage for the Guardian . "Hearing those records, I felt like I wasn't such a freak, that there was a bigger world than Connecticut, where I was going crazy." Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.