Peter Doig: Contemporary Artists (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

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It’s easy for me to imagine that the Scottish-Canadian – among other things, a painterly poet of snow – found an invigorating sunburst of colour in Trinidad, just as Gauguin and Matisse did while travelling south. The model for the curving walls was a black-and-white postcard of a dam in what was then East Germany which Doig had found on a trip to play hockey in the Czech Republic. 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. In the ethereal universe of Canal (2023), which sees north London’s beloved Regent’s Canal shoved backwards through a nightmarish Edvard Munch cityscape, Doig’s son sits silently by a plate of eggs while a young man in a drab kitchen-sink overcoat drives a houseboat. A Doig painting usually begins with an idea, and years can elapse before the right configuration of memory, chance associations, art-historical references—he seems to remember every painting he has ever seen—and images from his visual archive brings it to completion.

Peter Doig - The Courtauld The Courtauld Lates – Peter Doig - The Courtauld

Trinidad’s annual carnival, with its steel bands, “blue devils,” and non-stop street dancing, rivals New Orleans’s Mardi Gras in its feverish creativity. Maybe it's to do with visiting my grandparents there every summer as a child, but I am aware of my Scottish ancestry.When slavery was abolished in Trinidad, in 1834, large numbers of indentured laborers were brought from India and China to work on the plantations and, later, in the oil-and-gas industry that replaced them. Cunningham's 1980 horror movie Friday the 13 th in which an exhausted young female protagonist boards and then falls asleep in a canoe on an otherwise huge empty lake. They depict hunting dogs on the prowl and otherworldly plants sprawled out in spectral blacks and reds. The complex, yet whimsical, relationship between form, brushwork, and content in this work is an important moment in contemporary painting. He rejects the split between figurative and abstract painting, however, and uses recognizable tropes of abstract painting - such as the dot or splatter - in the service of representation or suggestion - as in his snowscapes.

Peter Doig - Rizzoli New York

Doig was fascinated by the use of reflection in film, which is often used to represent an entrance point into another world. The idea was the trees were illuminated by city light or artificial light from afar - I had just read Don Delillo's White Noise (1985) that influenced the light in these paintings as well. I found people very welcoming,” says the artist, who in turn embraced its culture, falling in love with calypso and soca music. Peter Doig, peintre britannique qui a grandi à Trinidad, et Derek Walcott, poète originaire de Sainte-Lucie, ont conçu cet ouvrage, Paramin, qui, par-delà les hommes, a fait se joindre le verbe de l'un au trait de l'autre, et s'interpénétrer leurs imaginaires : "ma plume et ton coup de pinceau se mêlant en un mètre unique", a écrit le poète.

They bonded through their love of painting, Trinidad, and music, and have been close friends ever since. Doig has developed a magical realist painting style, which has some resonances with Surrealism, however is particular in its suggestion of narrative, character, and conflicting worlds. Cooke was particularly enamoured with Alpinist, which “struck me as a masterpiece with the force of an avalanche; it should be owned by a great museum, not (as it is) by a private collector”.