Peter Doig

Private Collection, New York

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is much warmer and brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a very small spot of media accretion to the centre left of the composition, visible in the catalogue illustration. There is a further minute speck of media accretion to the centre of the left extreme turnover edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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As Adrian Searle notes, "Many of Doig's paintings, especially those made during the 1990s, recollect and revisit [the] scenes of his youth. There are paintings of days spent skiing and playing ice hockey, wandering snowbound wooded suburbs and frozen lakes, images of the stasis and suspended time of remembered days. But they are more than a collection of sentimental fragments and gilded views; there's threat among these snatches of autobiography, invented scenes, and elisions of fact and fiction. Emptiness and strangeness, fearfulness and uncertainty are the feelings that come to mind." (Adrian Searle, 'A Kind of Blankness' in Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 60)

The buildings that often appear in Doig's paintings are sometimes based on places the artist knows from his past, while others are taken from images in magazines.  This painting represents the clubhouse of a nudist colony, Camp Forestia, located on Tiger Mountain, Washington State. This particular clubhouse, always shown with its reflection in a lake and with a solitary figure sitting in front of it, figures in a series of related works by the artist from 1996. These include a much larger painting that presents similar image, a medium scale canvas depicting the clubhouse in a winter landscape (Private Collection, USA); a small painting on canvas (Private Collection, New York); a small painting on board (Private Collection); and a pastel on paper drawing (Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York).