Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1959 and spent his childhood in Trinidad and Canada. He attended Wimbledon School of Art, St Martins School of Art and Chelsea School of Art in London before returning to Trinidad where he lives and works. He won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994.

Doig may be considered a landscape painter, responding to his itinerant life by conjuring up the forests and lakes of Montreal and the bright beaches of the Caribbean through vivid tones on large canvases. These landscapes are deceptive however; the impressionistic colours and snowstorm of brushstrokes evade any definite geography and draw on personal snapshots, collective memory and dreams. Bold and affecting, they have much in common, in imagination and scale, with scenes from a movie.

Untitled (Green) (1998)is one of a number of oil on paper studies made by Doig, partially inspired by the concluding moments of the horror film Friday the 13th(dir. Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). Working on a quieter, more intimate scale, Doig produced a series of etchings derived from his own paintings from the period 1992 to early 1995. The artist refers to this printmaking as a process of cataloguing his previous works, creating a layering of image sources, which is typical of his practice. The etchings originate from his paintings, the paintings in turn originate from photographs, mostly taken by artist, who savours the slippage of detail between the three processes.

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Oil

    A medium in which ground pigments are mixed to produce a paste or liquid that can be applied to a surface by a brush or other tool; the most common oil used by artists is linseed, this can be thinned with turpentine spirit to produce a thinner and more fluid paint. The oil dries with a hard film, and the brightness of the colour is protected. Oil paints are usually opaque and traditionally used on canvas.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

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