Research: Artist, Peter Doig

Peter Doig b. 1959

Introduction

Peter Doig is Scottish painter and one of the most renowned living figurative painters. In 2007, his painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist.

Themes of "magical realism" stream through Peter Doig’s work, capturing timeless moments of perfect tranquillity. Doig works on a large scale.

Art critic Jonathan Jones has said about him: "Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity...…..

"Stroke of genius: Peter Doig's eerie art whisks the mind to enchanted places",

Jonathan Jones (16 May 2015), The Guardian.

Works

Peter Doig, Concrete Cabin, 1991-92, Oil on canvas, 200.5x241cm

In this example, Doig works on a large scale. The canvas is more than twice the size of my latest “large” painting .

An eerie quality is created here in a woodland setting. The concrete building in the background comes alive with strange floating shapes, shadows and lights which seem to have an organic life of their own. The large scale provides further opportunity to explore possibilities surrounding compositional elements of a painting. 
Doig has cropped the image to exclude ground or sky, so that the view has no physical orientation, which catches the sense of mystery. Feelings of being in and encompassed by the woods are evoked.

Doig applies oil paint in a variety of consistencies, ranging from thin washes which seep into one another to areas of thick impasto. His paintings are about the sensuous materiality of paint as much as the subjects which they portray. His approach is illustrated by the small section of Concrete Cabin (below) where we can see the use of line, wash and texture in distinct areas.

 

(Detail) 

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/concrete-cabin-81525/search/actor:doig-peter-b-1959/view_as/grid/page/1

 

Peter Doig, Concrete Cabin, 1994, Oil on Canvas, 198 x 275cm

Building on a similar theme, this painting by Doig of a modern apartment block invokes a mysterious cosmopolitan scene, where the building is almost obliterated by a tangled wilderness. We are only allowed a glimpse inside, which is strangely uncanny. Doig has again cropped the image to exclude ground or sky, so that the view has no physical orientation, but catches the mood of a fleeting moment.

Again, the work is on a similar large scale, which better  permits the creation of a brooding atmosphere.

https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/doig_concrete_cabin.htm

Peter Doig, Echo Lake, 1998 oil on canvas, 230 x 360 cm

Echo Lake is a very large, dark painting of a scene at night, even larger than the previous two examples. It is landscape in format, with a composition based on horizontal bands of colour overlaid with detail representing the shore of a lake. It tells a narrative where a man stands at the lakeshore looking out of the painting towards the viewer. His hands encircle his face and his mouth is an o-shape indicating that he is shouting out into the dark lake. His shout recalls The Scream 1893 one of the best-known paintings by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944).

The bottom half of the painting represents a blurry mirror image of the landscape above the shoreline. This mirrored reflection provides the visual version of an echo. Images reflected in water are common in Doig’s paintings and introduce another dimension to his paintings where images mirror each other as a compositional device, adding interest and mood.

Speaking about his work, Doig has commented:

“People often say that my paintings remind them of particular scenes from films or certain passages from books, but I think it’s a different thing altogether. There is something more primal about painting. In terms of my own paintings, there is something quite basic about them, which inevitably is to do with their materiality. They are totally non-linguistic. There is no textual support to what you are seeing. Often I am trying to create a ‘numbness’. I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words ... I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience, or mood or feeling of being there ... I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of ... I am using ... natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting”.

 (Quoted in Scott, pp.15 and 17.)

Kitty Scott, Peter Doig, exhibition catalogue, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Power Plant, Toronto 2001, pp.8-10, 13-14, reproduced (colour) p.29

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/doig-echo-lake-t07467

Conclusions and relevance to my practice

The scale of his paintings allows Doig the space to employ the wide range of his painting techniques and to more fully express the feelings he describes. I can build on Doig's ideas and use scale both to envelop the viewer within the landscape and to use more expressive arm movements to make bolder, stronger paintings. I can use a bigger canvas to experiment with different mark - making techniques, such as thick impasto, thin washes, texture and line.

Doig's  ideas about reflections are interesting. Many of my paintings and prints include water and reflections. I have not thought about using them as a compositional device and I think that I could give more thought to this concept.