Peter Doig

I heard about an artist today by the name of Peter Doig. If you feel you need to learn about colour then this is the man to help you out. Enjoy

 

Themes of magical realism stream through Peter Doig’s work, capturing timeless moments of perfect tranquillity, where photo-album memory flits in and out of waking dream. Drawing from his Canadian childhood, and one of the spookier scenes from Friday the 13th, Peter Doig’s canoes have become a seminal image in his work; their reflection in the water, like a double life, is a fantasy mirror to the unknown. Canoe-Lake is rendered with unsettling perfection: capturing not just a spying view over a fence, but the strange echoing silence of drifting on a lake, the impossible stillness of the current, and the cloying warmth of late-summer air.

Based on the viewpoint of an insect whose perception of the world is found at ground level, Peter Doig created the Grasshopper using three equally spaced bands that command its composition. Broadly coloured yet intricately detailed, this device appears to mimic the geological strata which construct the earth. The top band contains the abstraction of the sky, created from the thin veils of vivid blue masked with successive layers of dragged and dabbed paint. The middle band contains the land, a small settlement isolated in the desert of an arid landscape, the telegraph poles and lines the only clue to the connection with the developed world. Infused with a rich warmth of light, this is a nameless landscape in the middle of a barren land, of no specific time. Reminiscent of the setting for the film Paris, Texas, the only clue to its identity would be the single figure buzzing around a garage.

The contemporary snowboarders seem oddly out of place in the Renoir-dappled sky and Derain-speckled drifts. But it’s the way Doig masters this illusionary effect of the paint that creates a convincing, almost tangible fourth dimension - the muffling stillness of the air, the soggy feel of slushing snow, the crisping smell of twilight. Doig plugs into a nostalgia that photography can never capture: the physicality of his paintings makes these generic memories more vivid and desirable than the viewer’s own.



Peter Doig’s paintings of Le Corbusier’s classic modernist apartment block offer a mysterious Utopia: cosmopolitan dream architecture nestled in (or imprisoned by) tangling wilderness. In Concrete Cabin, it’s the nowhereness of the scene which is strangely uncanny: the bright minimalist grid of the building beaconing through the dark shadows of the trees; an everyday glimpse from a suburban sidewalk twisted into something magical; a set from a contemporary fable. Peter Doig paints this scene with chimerical effect; cropping the image to exclude ground or sky, it has no physical orientation or weight, only the intangible presence of a fleeting moment