Peter Doig
Snow, canoes, half-remembered landscapes, and the painter who moved to Trinidad.
Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, raised in Trinidad and Canada, and studied in London at Wimbledon, Saint Martins and Chelsea. He came to attention in the early 1990s with large landscapes built from photographs, film stills, memory and postcards — a canoe on black water taken from Friday the 13th, a modernist Le Corbusier apartment block seen through winter trees, figures in snow. The surfaces are heavily worked, dripped and scraped. He moved to Trinidad in 2002, which changed the palette entirely, and later divided his time between there, New York and London.
The output is small — he paints slowly and has always destroyed work — and the 1990s canvases are the most sought part of it, with the Trinidad paintings a distinct and strong market of their own. Works on paper, including the studies and the drawings made for the Studiofilmclub posters in Port of Spain, are much more numerous and considerably more accessible. The print market is significant: etchings and screenprints published by Paragon and others in small editions. A litigation over a disputed attribution in 2016 made documentation from the artist unusually consequential.
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