Elizabeth Peyton has been collecting popular images and drawing people her whole life. As she got older, these two activities came together. “When I was very young, just like a lot of young people, I had lots of pictures up on the wall,” she said recently by phone from her home on the North Fork of Long Island. “Heroes like John McEnroe or Dorothy Hamill — a lot of sports stars, not artists. I really loved how they were going beyond what they could be.” Ms. Peyton, born in Danbury, Conn., in 1965, still enjoys running and swimming, and finds an analogy between the athletic pursuit and the artistic one: “It is the hope that you can be more than what you are. Both activities are very freeing.”

In a new show on view at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, Ms. Peyton’s prints allow stars of past and present to hang together. There’s Oscar Wilde and his inamorato Bosie, Georgia O’Keeffe as seen by Stieglitz, Jacqueline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., along with Eminem, Andre 3000 of Outkast, and Nicole Kidman. Also present are Rirkrit Tiravanija (an installation artist and Ms. Peyton’s husband), and Gavin Brown, her dealer. Though intimate in scale, these heads occupy their space through Ms. Peyton’s seductive handwriting: a loose brushy touch, and lusty outlining of brows and chins and deep red lips.

Ms. Peyton studied at the School of Visual Arts during the 1980s, when many members of the painting faculty were second-generation Abstract Expressionists. She said she appreciated teachers like Michael Goldberg and Mary Heilmann, although she remembers some other faculty members dismissing her work as too illustrative. Ms. Peyton found her true mentors in the history department, with postmodernists like Douglas Blau and Craig Owens. Mr. Blau introduced her to 19th-century French literature, and “through his romantic sensibility, pointed me in the direction of the kind of person I wanted to pursue.” Owens, she said, was “constantly deconstructing why things were the way they were in the art world.”

Ms. Peyton began her career by showing in public places, rather than official venues. She showed in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, a pub in London, and a private apartment in Germany.”I wanted these pictures to be part of the world, to just enter people’s lives. I think the best part about art is that it’s so human, and people really do need it.” She believes in the viability of her medium: Painting “wasn’t a choice. It was the only way for me.” She said, “It’s just like guitar music. As long as there’s someone to bring it alive, it’s alive.”

In the past, most of Ms. Peyton’s work was based on photographs she collected or took herself; she works freehand from these sources. But over the past four years, she has begun working from life more. She said it allows her to achieve a richer reality. “Generally people are a lot more beautiful than if they are just snapped in a second. You don’t feel all the richness that you do in their presence, and they’re moving, and you hear the tone of their voice, and maybe the way their eyes close.” Many of the prints at Guild Hall were created working from life in the print studio.

Although working from life allows her more access to “reality,” part of the appeal of her work comes from the extremism of color and light that stems from a two-dimensional image as source material. Ms. Peyton calls it the “effects of my own bad photography,” like exaggerated color and surface patterns. Her work — including the prints shown at Guild Hall — seduces because of these attributes. She’s a modern-day Fauve, using highly keyed color and a visual shorthand to mark the defined cheekbones, arched black brows, and long, girlish bangs many of her pop-star subjects tend to share.

The majority of the prints shown at Guild Hall are monotypes. In that most painterly of print media, the artist paints directly onto a piece of Plexiglas or an etching plate, which is then transferred via etching press onto a sheet of paper. “You can’t spend too much time on the monotypes, because they have to be printed when they are still wet,” she said. “It kind of loosens my hand up, and surprises me, showing me what I’m interested in and what I’m not.” Her prints display an immediacy that makes them appear as “painterly” as her actual paintings.

Ms. Peyton finds her artistic lineage in literary romantic figures like Balzac and Wilde, portraitists such as Van Dyck, Sargent, and David Hockney. In her prints she embraces an unlikely universe of historical and contemporary figures. The commonality, she says, is that her subjects are people she loves.”It’s about loving what they do, or what they’ve done with themselves … rising to the occasion of their lives.”