Peter Doig

A solitary and independent voice within the YBA modern-media dominated landscape of the 1990s, Peter Doig is credited with resurrecting the investigation into the poignancy and relevance of traditional oil painting. Best known for his innovative exploration of the formal and thematic possibilities of landscape as well as his rigorous approach to surface, texture and color, he is internationally recognised as being amongst the most influential artists of his generation, and was one of the few British artists whose work was selected for exhibition in the recent re-hang at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Doig’s brightly-colored landscapes depict monumental panoramas where the urban and natural worlds collide. Like the atmospherically saturated paintings of Edward Hopper, they occupy the twilight zones of reality where photo-album memory meets waking dream and the everyday is invested with a feeling of the otherworldly.

Seemingly pastoral and place specific, Bob’s House is constructed from a compilation of Doig’s own memories, mass media images and painterly invention as opposed to any single reality. It consequently emanates a quiet, collective nostalgia; a lingering sense of long forgotten memories. Painted in the winter of 1993, it belongs to his celebrated series of snow paintings that took their inspiration from his childhood in wintry Canada. Along with Pink Snow (Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Blotter (for which Doig was awarded the prestigious John Moores Prize in 1993), Bob’s House ranks among his most ambitious and technically assured compositions from this seminal period and was integral in securing his nomination for the Turner Prize the following year. Depicting a row of snow covered houses glimpsed through a gap in trees, he enlivens the veiled narrative tensions found within his best early paintings like Swamped and Milky Way, and leads the viewer deeper into the landscape. Neither day or night nor dawn or dusk, the frozen serenity of the landscape is tinged with a foreboding sense that emanates from the infeasibility of its gaudy palette. Painted in dripping channels, the pink and white foreground seeps its way across the composition, holding the viewer’s gaze suspended within a fleeting moment. The overall effect is one of eerie tranquility - of a snowy idyll frozen under the spell of the artist’s imagination.

Simultaneously fragile, loose and lyrical, Bob’s House bears witness to the ongoing debates prevalent in 20th century art between abstraction and figuration, change and tradition. Painted slowly with discernable tentativeness, its brushstrokes are as much the focal point of the painting as the subject itself, as Doig draws freely upon the styles and methods of other artists whilst still maintaining the closely-guarded intimacy of its painted world. The evolution of the abstract, individual marks upon the surface into a cohesive image provides a virtuoso display of painterly techniques and inspirations that range from Watteau and Ryman to Richter and Pollock. The thick impasto paint in places seems to melt its way across the composition, disrupting the all-consuming static landscape and adding to its sense of expectation and unseen drama. The whites are painted as if they have got every color behind them while the crimsons have a translucence through which every color seems to emerge. The processes involved and the resulting image pay homage to the freedoms afforded by the painted medium’s absolute malleability; of its capacity for invention and renewal. Its fluidity oscillating between pointillist effect, impressionist traits and loose expressionist gesture is evidence of the increasing confidence in his painting that followed Doig’s award of the prestigious John Moores Prize earlier that year.

Doig’s paintings are mental spaces combining experience, thought and fantasy in which numerous realities coalesce and overlap in a juncture of places, times and styles. They exist as composite collages of disparate sources and ideas, becoming metaphors for the constant ebb and flow osmosis of life. The artist has spoken of his images as bordering the rich seams between memories, flashbacks and dreams and this is reflected in their use of multiple photographic sources. When he begins a new painting Doig chooses a photo that seems somehow telling or poignant to him, and uses it "like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want…. I'm not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented." (Peter Doig, 2002, cited on www.crownpoint.com)