Peter Doig

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Glarus, Kunsthaus Glarus, Peter Doig: Version, 1999, no. 20, illustrated in colour

Born in Scotland, Peter Doig spent much of his early life in Canada and the vast deserted landscapes of that country had a profound effect on his artistic vision. Here, man’s insignificance in nature became abundantly clear in comparison to, for example, the man-made advanced capitalist landscape of London which Doig moved to in the 1980s. It is the dramatic contrasts between these two opposing habitats which combine powerfully in Doig’s work. Highly influenced by the grand tradition of landscape painting in the canon of art history, from Edvard Munch to the Impressionists to the Canadian Group of Seven painters from the early 20^th century, Doig mixes these inspirations with his passion for film, photography and music to create contemporary paintings of Post-Modern existence.

Figure in Mountain Landscape is perhaps one of Doig’s most well known images. He has made four versions of this painting, one of which is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, (Fig. 1), and the other two are in private collections. As the smallest example, this work was probably the first of the four and each subsequent painting was executed on a different scale, with different cropping and with very different colours. The basis for the title was a Francis Bacon painting from the collection of the Kunsthalle, Zurich (see Fig. 1). However, the image is taken from a 1935 Joachim Gauthier photograph of Franklin Carmichael, painting at Grace Lake, Northern Ontario. Carmichael was one of the Group of Seven painters who wanted to scour this vast landscape of their Canadian homeland in a literal painterly voyage of discovery. They wanted to paint where no man had set foot before. Extremely romantic in feel, the photograph almost refers back to the 18^th century paintings of Caspar David Friedrich with the notion of the artist being dwarfed by the beautiful landscape which surrounds him. Dressed in the simplest of hooded tops to protect himself from the elements, in the photographer’s eyes he becomes a magical, almost shaman-like, figure.

These two very disparate influences combine to powerful pictorial effect. On the one hand, Francis Bacon, an artist who never left his London studio and only painted the landscape from photographs, produced a series of paintings in the late 1950s which were extremely graphic in their use of gaudy colour and wild expressive strokes as a background and contrast to the relatively controlled depiction of the human figure. On the other, Franklin Carmichael was an artist who wanted to be at one with nature and painted the great outdoors the way he saw it with his own eyes, en plein air. With these two influences filtered through Doig’s, what results is an enchanting, dream-like scene in which sequential layers and veils of colour hover majestically over a light ochre ground. Using black paint over the yellow to almost ‘draw’ out the landscape and re-create every crevice, ridge and plain in the mountainside, Doig contrasts this with the iridescent beauty of the jewel-like emerald green which lights up the lake and sky. In the foreground the ghost-like figure is further emphasized through an emphasis of its solid form, which seems to effortlessly float.

The scale and cropping are also important here. By turning this into a compact portrait format, Doig really emphasizes the direct physical relationship between man and landscape to the point where the intensity of the space verges on the point of abstraction. Much like the Francis Bacon which inspired it, this painting is as much about abstract colour and form as it is about the subject of its title. The way that the colours breathe through each other and glow is reminiscent of Rothko and the way that the shapes are built in planes bears echoes of Clyfford Still. Ultimately, however, Peter Doig uses a melting pot of ideas and influences to create a painterly vocabulary which is uniquely his own. Figure in Mountain Landscape was executed at a time in the mid 1990s when his artistic compatriots in London were receiving great international attention and acclaim for a conceptually based art which was in direct opposition to his own. However, this painting seems to represent an important turning point in his career when he found an iconic image for his own existence, one which has become increasingly influential on a new school of international painting.