Peter doig short biography
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“I feel my paintings are deeply connected to my life.
The dreamlike work references Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night, produced a century before as an hallucinogenic, emotive, portrayal of van Gogh's view from the window of his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum. His mouth is open as if he is calling out.
The canvas depicts three young men, standing in front of the ocean as the rising moon or setting sun brightens the horizon. Doig said: "I looked at the coloration and the expression. He had to prove in court that he was not the artist behind a bizarre desert landscape signed "1976 Pete Doige". But when he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, he got even more attention for his artwork from the public.
He learned to get round it through taking photographs, and projecting them onto canvas to paint on top.
He lived in King's Cross, which he described at the time as "a mad, rough place, full of oddballs and artists".
This mode of combining reality, memories, fictions, and images from film and photography became Doig's trademark style and marks a bold integration of postmodern pastiche and collage sensibilities with traditional painting and historical reference points.
Oil paint on canvas - Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
1991
Charley's Space
On a snow-capped hill sits a large wooden house.
He now lives in Trinidad where he leads a simple, healthy life. The movement on top of the ice is mesmerizing and the figure is totally absorbed in his action. He has set up a film club, along with Ofili, which meets in a large room next to his studio every Thursday night where he and friends drink beer, watch arthouse movies and talk about what they have seen.
The Legacy of Peter Doig
Defiant in the face of conceptualist, multimedia, deskilling practices, Doig's paintings use specific, autobiographical moments to connect with universal emotions in a mystical and intangible way.
Doig is a meticulous colorist, who often uses uneasy, disquieting color combinations to create simultaneously charming and foreboding landscape paintings.
Blotter won the first prize in the 1993 John Moores Painting Prize exhibition, representing a turning point in Doig's career, and an appetite for this strange and enticing form of Magical Realism.
Oil on Canvas - The Walker Art Gallery
1997
Canoe Lake
This canvas features a green canoe floating on a yellow lake.
Its roof is dusted with snow and there are dark forests in the background. My work looked very different to everything else on show and, not just that, but some of the artists did not want to show their work in the same space as me. They are reflected beneath on a still black lake in which floats a lone girl in a canoe, her tiny body enhancing the painting's sense of scale.
It was, Doig believed, a symptom of an art market gone mad. To go into a studio and think you're going to make a painting that's going to make a million dollars or a hundred thousand."
Doig has dealt with personal difficulties in the past decade.
Doig’s Paintings
One of Doig’s most famous paintings is titled White Canoe, which is a piece of artwork that shows a white canoe in the middle of the water with a surrounding landscape.
“Those experiences have had a huge impact on my painting,” he says.