Peter Doig (1959 – )

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.