Peter Doig

"I never try to create real spaces – only painted spaces. That’s all I’m interested in. That may be why there is never really any specific time or place (or sometimes even season…) in my paintings" (Peter Doig in Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Cher Peintre, 2002)

Before any analysis of a work by Peter Doig, one needs to examine its historical precedent. Although the images would appear to be highly traditional in feel, their surface construction is steeped in Doig’s fascination with the history of painting. However, this "sphere of influence" does not manifest itself directly in Doig’s work. More his studious fascination with the techniques, philosophies and imagery of his artistic forefathers are intensively consumed, mediated in his mind and translated to his own unique painterly hand on the canvas. Thus, Doig’s best works can be read on several levels. The experience is as much about the immediacy of the scene which he creates, as it is about the depth of the visual histories which construct the image. Contained within the apparently conventional depiction of Winter Landscape – Backyard lies a painted space with very little causal relationship to the real space Doig depicts. As one draws closer to its richly physical surface, one can begin to peel back the layers of reference which lie within its rich texture. By giving it this simple title, Doig immediately sets up a relationship with the history of the depiction of winter in landscape painting.

A key reference appears to be Pieter Brueghel, The Elder. When, in the late 16th Century, Brueghel set out to create his masterpiece, The Seasons, he took the level of landscape painting from simply functioning as an atmospheric support for mythological, religious and historical events to the subject itself. As such, by attempting to isolate the individual character of each season and show how humankind interacts with the changing landscape, Brueghel embodied and represented the enigmatic relationship between nature and man. Apart from the obvious similarities in the treatment of certain compositional elements and colours, the painting Hunters in the Snow (Fig. 1) from the series would appear to have a direct influence on the present work. Simply because the landscape has been treated atmospherically rather than descriptively, the picture itself rules out any reference to a particular place and might adequately be described as a "snowscape". Although, we know this is a backyard, the backyard has no defining characteristics outside of the the nature which inhabits it.

Monet famously changed the course of landscape painting by painting en plein air. His aim was to record his "sensation" or "feeling" of being in the landscape. By painting the same subject in all sorts of conditions his aim was to convey not so much what he saw in the scene, but what he "experienced" within the landscape. In a work such as Sandviken, Norway (Fig 2.), Monet placed himself in the freezing cold and gave perhaps the most accurate depiction yet of the sensation of snow. From the warmth of his studio, Doig translates his images from photographs and other sources in a style reminiscent of Monet. However, in Winter Landscape-Backyard, the tight stipple of snow across the surface, the circular blobs of white paint which animate the lattice of intertwining trees and their tightly knit branches creates a negative space in the composition, as opposed to Monet's positive space. As Doig has suggested on the subject of snow, he wants to create "a screen through which one is forced to look, a distancing from the subject being represented."

Thus Doig has here created a painting in which the nature of the liquid layers which build the surface find reminiscence in the histories which build the image. Cast against a slightly green background, reminiscent of The Hunters in the Snow, the delicately translucent veil of white snow battles with the symmetry of the two trees for compositional dominance. In so doing, the layers begin to blur and the painting flatten to icy atmospheric effect. Meanwhile, in the ‘background’, four square black windows glow with a menacing air. Doig has here created a rich Post-Modern painting which takes the age-old theme of man versus nature and turns it into a highly contemporary narrative about the painter versus nature versus the painter. In so doing, Doig has managed to find a sublime echoing between the paint and the image and create a composition which is as pictorially intelligent as it is dramatically beautiful.

As he has started "I think the way that the paintings come out is more a way of trying to depict an image that is not about a reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of a scene and something that is in your head" (Peter Doig in Matthew Higgs, Peter Doig – 20 Questions, London 2001, p. 15)