Peter Doig

Painted in 1983, the year that Peter Doig graduated from London’s Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, Roy Revisited is an early painting which affords a rare insight into Doig’s maturing artistic vision. An imagistic painter who innovatively fuses new media influences with more traditional modes of landscape painting, Doig’s fascination with film is witnessed in this early depiction of the fifties screen legends Roy Rogers and his steed Trigger. One of a group of paintings depicting cowboys executed while at Saint Martin’s, Roy Revisited dramatically presages the incorporation of film derived iconography into the visual language of later masterworks, such as the assimilation of the motif of the slumped figure in a canoe from the cult horror classic Friday the 13^th into Swamped, 1990. Here, the motif of the cowboy, a generic character type, meshes together with symbols of American and European culture: the Marlboro slogan and Michelangelo’s David.  

At Saint Martin’s, Doig counts the tutelage of John Stezaker and Rosetta Brooks as formative influences on his work, as well as the major paintings exhibitions, such as the New Spirit of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1981 and the hugely influential paintings shows that Nicholas Serota was organising at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where Doig was to be given his first public show in 1991. “When I started, figurative painting was pretty much off the agenda, and the painting that did happen there was quite localised, British painting. Almost like a kind of lyrical abstraction. The artists who were prominent – people like Jennifer Durrant and Patrick Heron – I didn’t have anything in common with. I was much more interested in imagistic painting. I would say that, at the beginning of the course, there were only a few people working with imagery, but that, by the time we left, pretty well everyone was.” (Peter Doig interviewed by Karen Wright in Modern Painters March 2006). In Roy Revisited, we witness Doig’s layering of different source images with his own memory hooks of his transatlantic upbringing. Insisting on the validity of oil painting at a time when this most traditional of media was being increasingly marginalised in favour of new media based art, Doig has continued to champion the merits of the medium and versatility that can be achieved with brush and oil.