Elizabeth Peyton: interview

American painter Elizabeth Peyton captures historical and pop-culture moments through her measured and characterful portraits of artists, celebrities and acquaintances. Intimate in scale and tightly cropped, Peyton adapts her charged but seemingly private encounters with Prince Harry or Kurt Cobain from news photos, confusing their relationship to pictures of her artist friends, painted at ease and direct from life. Her first major retrospective, 'Live Forever', includes portraits of British artists David Hockney, Jake Chapman as well as Angus Fairhurst, who committed suicide last year.

Why does this city have special resonance for you?
'I lived in London for a time in the 90s and I love it here. You know, I just go and see shows and have great dinners and walk around.'

Do you come to visit certain friends?
'Yeah, but I don't want to list my friends. The pictures aren't so much about visiting - it's not a literal narrative in that way - but there is this sense of a place, where I can put my thoughts about something or somebody.'

So you prefer painting from life?
'There's no more or less, it's just what suits me when I'm working. With people I know, it's great to be face-to-face with them in a room, although it's much scarier in a way. And you can't be that formal when you're sitting together or they're just reading or sleeping, like Maurizio [Cattelan] eating a bowl of Mexican food. No one is famous when they wake up in the morning, so it's nice seeing people in moments when they're just being themselves. Most of the paintings of artists are of people I know unless they happen to be dead, like Georgia O'Keefe or Frida Kahlo. The picture of Angus [Fairhurst] means a lot to me and I'm happy to have had that time with him.'

Why are the paintings so small?
'I'm not conscious of that; I just do them. I like to focus on what I want to see and be very clear about what I don't want to see. Sometimes it's nice to have a limitation or an economy, because it forces other things on the picture to be more extreme. There's a whole world within that reduction and I like that you can get close to them, hold them and carry them. When I was younger I thought I should paint larger but much of what I'm making can be very delicate and just wouldn't translate into bigger marks.'

Some of your prints are almost lifesize, however…
'Yeah, there's a nice one of Carl and Pete from the Libertines. I think Pete Doherty 's just so good - or at least he was, I don't know what he's up to now - but his voice is so amazing. I also drew Jay Z with his guitar at Glastonbury, I loved that moment.'

That controversy was all whipped up by Oasis of course.
'That was small thinking, you'd think that people would be more open to what music is about.'

And yet here's your picture of Liam being friendly with Jarvis Cocker…
'From afar it seemed like two people going through the same thing at the same time - all wrapped up and smoking together at an awards ceremony. I didn't know Jarvis at that time, but I found his story very inspiring. It sounds clichéd, but I felt that Jarvis was someone you should have on your wall to look up to and think about. He just stuck with it and his music got better and better. Even jumping up with Michael Jackson on stage seemed so heroic, I understand why he felt he had to get in the way of that.'

Didn't you once say that you wouldn't paint Michael Jackson because he was only famous for being famous?
'I probably said it in a much simpler way, as it wouldn't ever have occurred to me to paint him; although obviously now I'm looking at all these pictures of him. Anyway, I would never not do something; I don't self-censor in that way. In fact, I find strength through embarrassment.'

You've moved on to still life and studies based around literature.
'Even when it's a painting of a person the feeling and thoughts are abstract, it's more about an atmosphere, but yes, still life does give me a lot of freedom. I've just re-read Madame Bovary, which made me understand romanticism. She wanted to endlessly repeat a romantic moment and it killed her. Romanticism is not just about being in a fixed state of endless beauty, because you can't live like that or live on that, that's what I've learnt.'

Is that part of the struggle of being a celebrity?
'I think you can leave fame out of the equation. You really need faith in yourself to make art and to stand up for what you believe in. There are individuals out there putting things out into the world and changing it. Napoleon built roads and said that everyone should go to school. Johnny Rotten, or John Lydon, wrote "God Save the Queen", which was just one man's idea, but everybody related to it. It was the same for Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, as his personal feelings echoed those of everybody around him and mirrored something bigger in society.'