Mark (Smoking)

Painted in 1996, and held in the same collection since 1999, Mark (Smoking) is an electric early portrait by Elizabeth Peyton. The painting was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1997. The subject of her intimate portrait is Mark Webber, the guitarist of the iconic ’90s British rock band Pulp. Masterfully deploying a selective palette of red, pink and orange, Peyton switches between loose, diaphanous washes and concentrated flashes of brilliant colour to render the musician’s likeness: his fantastically fiery hair, bold red shirt, and blushed lip. He is captured in a contemplative side profile, one hand curled pensively next to his delicately painted face, the other cropped from view. Recalling the rich traditions of portraiture, from Singer Sargent to Rossetti, Peyton’s practice makes many nods to art history—indeed, struck by the artist’s incandescent portraits of the late Kurt Cobain, critic Roberta Smith called her paintings ‘part Abstract Expressionist, part Renaissance miniature, with a touch of Pre-Raphaelite romanticism’ (R. Smith, ‘Blood and Punk Royalty to Grunge Royalty’, The New York Times, 24 March 1995, section C, p. 30). Widely-celebrated for her portraits of wide-ranging subjects, from European royalty—Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Princess Diana—to rock stars, actors, artists, family and friends, Peyton has stated: ‘There is no separation for me between people I know through their music or photos and someone I know personally. The way I perceive them is very similar, in that there’s no difference between certain qualities that I find inspiring in them’ (E. Peyton, Elizabeth Peyton, New York 2005, p. 16).