Elizabeth Peyton

By Jarvis Cocker

Elizabeth Peyton has painted the rich, the famous, and the incredibly attractive-particularly that cool, unaffected brand of attractive that is thin, fey, angular, and so often swathed in long, scruffy hair. Since her career took off after her first New York City show in 1988, her subjects have included superhuman icons like Kurt Cobain, David Bowie, Prince William, Napoleon, and John Lennon as well as more immediate flesh-and-bone personalities like downtown artist Spencer Sweeney and designer Marc Jacobs. Even with such celebrated subjects, Peyton's work could never be described as hedonistic or star-obsessed. Somehow in her pellucid oils and sharp, darting lines, the 43-year-old New York artist has managed to capture a crucial crossroads where the cool public persona transects the fragile being underneath. This past summer, Peyton put on a show of her photographs (many served as source work for her portraits) at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The exhibition served as a warm-up for a career retrospective "Live Forever" at New York's New Museum opening this month. For Interview, Peyton gets on the phone with one of her most striking and consistent subjects, musician Jarvis Cocker. After all, he's been modeling for her from day one, even if he didn't know it at the time.

JARVIS COCKER: Are you in New York?

ELIZABETH PEYTON: Yes, I'm at the New Museum. Where are you?

JC: I'm back in Paris. I was in New York last week.

EP: Yeah. I saw you play. At Terminal 5. Did you have a good time at that show?

JC: Yeah, I did. I was a bit nervous because I was playing some new songs, and it's always nerve-racking when you play new material.

EP: It seemed to go very well. The new songs are very hard rock.

JC: I think it's probably a midlife-crisis thing. You get to a certain age and you just want to prove that you can still rock-that you've still got it.

EP: That's very American.

JC: It's not like I'm going to start wearing leather and spandex.

EP: No, it's nice to do that in a suit. It seemed like you were talking a lot more between the songs. Is that something you think about before you go onstage?

JC: Sometimes I'll write a few topics to speak about during the course of the evening-either things that have happened to me during the day or local things pertaining to the place we're playing. But that particular night I didn't. I just thought, I'll see what happens.