Nick in Orient (Nick Mauss)

With succulent oil colors and luxurious brushstrokes, Elizabeth Peyton paints people she knows, wishes she knew, admires from afar. Although Peyton portrays some of her friends, fellow artists, rock musicians, poets, British royals, and historical figures sitting on chairs, drinking from glasses and coffee cups, or asleep on beds, her name almost always evokes faces and close-ups of heads. Born in 1965, she studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She first worked from photographs and reproductions, the sort that hung on the walls of her childhood bedroom in Danbury, Connecticut. Her debut solo show was with the Manhattan gallery Gavin Brown's Enterprise in 1993. After living in the East Village, Peyton moved to the North Fork in 2001, where she initially worked in the basement of her house. "In the studio I had in New York," she explained, "I could never work until the late afternoon, when the sun had gone down. Here, I'm not bothered by how beautiful it is outside. I like to disappear a bit." Critics and curators have called attention to the diminutive size of the canvases, Masonite boards, and sheets of paper on which Peyton works. To be sure, her paintings, drawings, and prints contrast markedly with the large-scale objects that dominate the art world. Nevertheless, while her art isn't large, many of the heads and faces of the rock musicians, British royals, and friends whom she depicts are life-size.