Objects of Our Desire

Elizabeth Peyton.

Elizabeth Peyton paints David Bowie.

"Sleeping, reclining, sitting, daydreaming, fantasizing, brooding -- Ms. Peyton hardly ever depicts these young artists and musicians standing, and she never visually associates them with an activity like making art or music -- Ms. Peyton's friends and lovers Piotr and Tony and Liam encounter her celebrity obsessions John Lennon and Prince Harry and Kurt Cobain like chess pieces on opposite sides of existence. The tribe of the obscure look strikingly similar to one another: blank-faced, thin, closed-up yet strangely open, looking so intensely outward that it feels they must actually be looking inward.

They are also strikingly similar to the tribe of the celebrities, who bear the same physical features. You feel that the desire of Ms. Peyton's friends to be famous is so powerful that they have acquired the appearance of the celebrities they yearn for -- the way dogs begin to resemble their masters."

Stella Vine.

Stella Vine paints Kate Moss.

"Most jarring of all, nearly all of Ms. Peyton's subjects, both famous and obscure, don't just resemble each other. They also look a lot like her: delicately featured, wispish, androgynous. Ms. Peyton has spoken of how moved she has been by Proust's meditations on the nature of time, and how Proust's work has influenced her attempts to capture her subjects in the web of fleeting mortality. But it seems that what she has really taken from Proust is his exploration of the way we project ourselves onto the objects of our desire. We recreate the people we love -- and the people we hate -- in our own image."

Alice Neel.

Alice Neel paints Andy Warhol.

"Ms. Peyton's likenesses may not capture her subjects as intimately as we would like, but she has used the embattled genre of portraiture to lay bare a very contemporary perceptual and emotional predicament. At a moment when technology has made it possible to "know" people without ever meeting them in the flesh, there is the peril of imagining them as mere reflections of our own wishes and obsessions. Then, too, we have just lived through a time when we were tempted into projecting our desires -- some would say our greed -- onto reality beyond the point where they could ever be satisfied. Ms. Peyton's dreamy, insubstantial figures, waiting to be fulfilled by fantasies that will never be realized, may be more intimately connected to us than we think."

- Lee Siegel, "Painting Faces", The Wall Street Journal, 2009.

A Drawing and a Quote

Adair Stephens, Hera, 2012, pastel on paper.

"Shortly before ten o'clock the stillness of the air grew quite oppressive, and the silence was so marked that the bleating of a sheep inland or the barking of a dog in the town was distinctly heard, and the band on the pier, with its lively French air, was like a discord in the great harmony of nature's silence. A little after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming.

Then without warning the tempest broke. With a rapidity which, at the time, seemed incredible, and even afterwards is impossible to realize, the whole aspect of nature at once became convulsed. The waves rose in growing fury, each overtopping its fellow, till in a very few minutes the lately glassy sea was like a roaring and devouring monster. White-cressed waves beat madly on the level sands and rushed up the shelving cliffs; others broke over the piers, and with their spume swept the lanthorns of the lighthouses which rise from the end of either pier of Whitby Harbour. The wind roared like thunder, and blew with such force that it was with difficulty that even strong men kept their feet, or clung with grim clasp to the iron stanchions. It was found necessary to clear the entire piers from the mass of onlookers, or else the fatalities of the night would have been increased manifold. To add to the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came drifting inland - white, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist swept by."

- Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897

Painter as Jedi

In a passage from one of the kitschy “Expanded Universe” Star Wars novels that I love to read, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker addresses his new pupils during their first lesson.  Even though Luke is talking about Jedi mind techniques and lightsaber dueling, I felt a kinship with what he was saying.  I’ve replaced “Jedi” with “painter” to make the metaphor that much more apparent:

          “I have brought you here to study and to learn, but I myself am still learning.  Every living thing must continue to learn until it dies.  Those who cease to learn, die that much sooner.
          “Perhaps it was misleading when I called this an ‘academy’ for [painters].  Though I will teach you everything I know, I don’t want you merely to listen to me lecture.
          “Your training will be a landscape of self-discovery.  Learn new things and share what you have learned with others.  I will call this place a praxeum.  This word, made up of ancient roots…distills the concepts of learning combined with action.  Our praxeum, then, is a place for the learning of action.  A [painter] is aware, but he does not waste time in mindless contemplation.  When action is required, a [painter] acts.”[i]

I have two thoughts on this quote: 1) even though Luke is clearly a master in his field, he is humble and wise enough to recognize that learning lasts a lifetime, and 2) the role of the peaceful warrior is very similar to that of an artist.  I didn’t realize how resonant the last two lines of the quote would be for painters until I switched out the words.

Cover art for Dark Apprentice

We don’t paint for the hell of it.
Our brushes are our swords.
We swing them, and they cut.
We hold them close, and they are quiet.
They can be honest blades.
We will act when action is required.
We will know when.

---

[i] Kevin J. Anderson, Dark Apprentice (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), 68-69.