The snowflakes are both figurative and abstract, and play with mark-making techniques to show how a painter might think about both snow (descriptively) and the colored dots of an abstract composition (formally). The complex, yet whimsical, relationship between form, brushwork, and content in this work is an important moment in contemporary painting. I’m coughing all the time because of the fumes,” he says. Paint fumes have long been an occupational hazard: Doig’s sinuses are often clogged thanks to the thinners he uses, but working with the studio windows closed during a London winter makes matters worse. “It’s not,” he says, “a very healthy way to go about living.” The high prices have brought new problems. Doig paintings are so costly to insure that museums have to think twice about showing them. He’s had major exhibitions at the Tate, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Louisiana Museum, in Denmark, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but nothing so far at MOMA, the Met, or other big museums in this country.

Peter Doig - AbeBooks Peter Doig - AbeBooks

Nicholas Serota, Chair of Arts Council England, said Doig's paintings "have a kind of mythic quality that's both ancient and very, very modern. They seem to capture a contemporary sense of anxiety and melancholy and uncertainty. Lately, he's gone more toward the sort of darkness we associate with Goya." This is evident here. The piece is menacing, asking more questions than it answers. Again we see the reflection motif, bringing up thoughts of drowning in the unknown. The low vantage point suggests we, the viewer, are in the lake, perhaps floating in one of Doig's famed canoes. We are far enough away to be unable to hear the officer's shouts of warning or rescue. Doig was always looking to produce "an image that is not about a reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of the scene and something that is in your head". By positioning us, the viewer, as the "screamer" in his own painting, Doig again centralizes an embodied, emotive experience of his work, an ideal that had long been absent in discussing important aspects of contemporary art's relationship to its audience. Additionally, blotting paper can be used to carry LSD, a drug that Doig took as a teen. Art critic Sean O'Hagan said: "A painting like the knowingly titled Blotter is charged with that heightened, fractured, but pinpoint-clear way of seeing that anyone who has taken the drug will immediately recognize." This was what Doig was trying to achieve with his work; he wanted the viewer to experience states of minds that are hard to describe.The Courtauld is delighted to share a new film that offers a rare glimpse into the studio of Peter Doig, one of the most celebrated and influential painters working today. It follows Doig in the days leading up to the opening of his exhibition of new work at The Courtauld Gallery. The daughter of an architect, Mogadassi met Doig when she came to work for his New York dealer, Gavin Brown, in 2010; she is now an independent curator who also works for the Michael Werner Gallery, which has exclusively represented Doig worldwide since 2012. In addition to the end of his marriage, Doig has had to cope with the recent death of his father, to whom he was very close, and with a protracted lawsuit, in which he had to prove that he had not painted a work that was attributed to him. Although the ensuing trial kept him away from his studio for months at a time, the paintings he has done in the past two years are among the most powerful and disturbing of his career. “Now, with all that trauma behind him, he’s freed up,” Mogadassi said to me. “He’s at an age when he doesn’t have anything to lose.” Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak), 2015

Peter Doig: Contemporary Artists (Phaidon Contemporary

Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Peter Doig was raised in Canada and spent two decades in London before moving to Trinidad, where he now lives and works. Doig graduated from St. Martins School of Art in 1983 and the Chelsea School of Art in 1990. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, and was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Hitch Hiker” also gave him the idea of using his Canadian experience in his work. “I suddenly had a subject that I hadn’t had before,” he said. Canada had always seemed familiar and mundane to him, but now, in London, it became exciting. During his time at Chelsea, and for the next few years, Doig painted what he called “homely” suburban houses, frozen ponds, ski areas, and open fields. The houses in these early paintings look uninhabited and desolate, and you see them through a screen of trees or underbrush, or blurred by falling snow. (He went on to paint architect-designed houses—including Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Briey-en-Forêt, France, half hidden behind a screen of trees.) He was painting spaces that you had to make an effort to look into. Since relocating from Trinidad to London in 2021, Doig has set up a new studio in the city where he has been developing paintings started in Trinidad, New York and elsewhere in preparation for their unveiling at The Courtauld Gallery exhibition. Blotter won the first prize in the 1993 John Moores Painting Prize exhibition, representing a turning point in Doig's career, and an appetite for this strange and enticing form of Magical Realism.What drew Doig to the musician? “Shadow was a real voice of the people. He sang about hardship, poverty, life, love. He was very different from other calypsonians. Shadow kept the catchiness while expressing things that made him vulnerable – his stage fright, his shyness. He was such a lovable figure.” The piece took six years to complete and Doig worked on it up until the moment it was delivered to the gallery. All of the artist's signature motifs are there; water, reflection, a solitary boat, snowfall, vivid color, and mysterious messages, but here the violence hinted at in previous pieces becomes more pronounced, literally foregrounded in the painting. In this lavish new volume devoted to his entire career-which includes paintings, drawings, and reference material, such as found photographs-art historians Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert mine the artist’s rich and varied work. Doig’s landscapes have been inspired by the many places the artist has lived-England, Canada, Trinidad. So, too, does memory, or the idea of memory, inform much of his production.

Peter Doig Paintings, Bio, Ideas | TheArtStory Peter Doig Paintings, Bio, Ideas | TheArtStory

Katharine Arnold of London auction house, Christie's, said: "In taking up archetypal images of Canada's landscape, Doig sought to distance himself from its specifics. These were not paintings of Canada in a literal sense, but rather explorations of the process of memory. For Doig, snow was not simply a souvenir of his childhood, but a conceptual device that could simulate the way our memories may be transformed and distorted over time." "Snow draws you inwards," Doig once said, which is why he so often used it as a device in his work, encouraging viewers to enter into his own remembered and filmic landscapes.The exhibition is sponsored by Morgan Stanley. Supported by Kenneth C. Griffin and the Huo Family Foundation, with additional support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne. The village of Paramin, in Trinidad’s high northern mountains, is a scattering of humble homes. Known for the peppers and thyme its farmers grow on hillside plots, the village is reachable only by vertiginous roads plied by old Land Cruisers that serve locals as communal taxis. Trinidad is an island known for its intertwined histories—it changed hands between the British, French, and Spanish, and has more than a million residents who boast roots in India or Africa or both—and Paramin is especially so. Many of the area’s people descend from slaves who fled cocoa plantations at the mountains’ feet, and older residents still speak a French Creole. Each year, during Trinidad’s famous carnival, the sons of these elders cover themselves in blue paint and fasten demons’ horns to their heads. The “blue devils” then gather at the town’s crossroads, spitting fake blood, to terrify the children of their neighbors, or of visitors from the island’s nearby capital of Port of Spain. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.