Peyton zeroes in on the coverlet's pattern its existence as pattern, rather than its homely specifics and transforms it into a richly colored throw, ready to drape on one of Matisse's models or Oscar Wilde's favorite chair. Despite her subjects' easy idleness, Peyton's transformations require quite a lot of work. So members of her fraternity won't be separated by the petty constraints of time and place, Peyton must banish most of her source images' temporal contingencies. Originally, the photos which inspire her painting earned their place in print because of their narrative charge they didn't just picture celebrities, but captured them doing something, whether singing, skiing, or escaping the crush of mobs at Heathrow. Yet if tabloids need verbs to complete their headlines, I think Peyton has little use for these parts of speech in her painting.
Action demands duration over time, and time is youth's mortal enemy.
Besides, through activity Peyton would only root her subjects in narrative, making them unavailable to freely traverse her indeterminate chronological terrain. She lets her boys smoke and push back their hair, if they must, but forbids them from playing Madison Square Garden at 9 pm on March 10, 1997. With a wave of Peyton's brush, a moment in time becomes any moment in time. Unlike Caravaggio and David, who excel at condensing an entire narrative into one moment like a good tabloid photograph, Peyton manages just the opposite. She rids good tabloid pictures of any story other than charisma and manages to emancipate almost any moment from its narrative obligation.