Princess Elizabeth

Elizabeth Peyton has said that what interests her in her subjects is their relationship to themselves: how they became what they are and what they chose to do. Paradoxically, her portrait of Queen Elizabeth II as the young Princess, one of her rare female subjects, is inevitably preoccupied with the portrayal of someone whose destiny was unique and entirely preordained. The original photograph which Peyton worked from was deliberately designed to portray the young Princess in a relaxed, informal pose without compromising her dignity as future monarch. Peyton's choice of subject and her desire to represent one of the most famous women in the world retrospectively, as a young woman on the cusp of adulthood and a uniquely responsible role, is a another manifestation of her apparent love affair with "this sceptered isle". Since painting this portrait, she has closely observed British culture and has added many of its male heroes, past and present, to her repertoire: Sid Vicious, John Lennon, Brian Epstein, Prince Harry, a young David Hockney and Oscar Wilde's lover 'Bosie', to name a few, collectively uniting Britishness, royalty and history. Like Warhol, she is infatuated with beautifying, personalizing and claiming a public image through painting it, as well as, of course, a love of famous people. Recycling their images from the debris of contemporary culture, the casual look of her paintings, with their roughly assembled edges and broad brush-strokes, belie the controlling hand of the artist and draws attention to their fragility as objects. "I don't intend them to be slick", explains Peyton, "I am not embarrassed by what people would take as the kitsch of the imagery."