Dossier - Peter Doig
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Peter Doig
1959, Edinburgh - Trinidad

Peter Doig’s unconditional belief in the medium of paint, his outstanding command of the métier and his frank association with the history of painting place him right at the centre of current international painting.He refuses to take up an ironic and mitigating attitude towards painting as an outmoded medium. The abandonment with which he dares to lose himself in the paint and the process of painting shows a great and unswerving faith in this classical medium.
 
The composition in broad horizontal bands is typical of Doig’s large scale landscapes. This is largely omitted in ‘Girl in White with Trees’, the painting acquired by the museum after the survey exhibition ‘Charley’s Space’ in 2003. The painting is built up of vertical transparent veils of paint in numerous shades of grey, blue and green. As usual in the case of Doig, the source of this painting is a photographic one. The painterly representation can actually be traced to a family photo of his eldest daughter taken from a window of his house in London.  Doig succeeds once again in linking a simple photographic representation to a pre-modern, romantic view of a landscape scene.
 
The other work in the collection, ‘Ten Etchings’ (1996), can be seen as an early and relevant series of prints in which Doig develops various narrative elements that keep returning throughout his work. These include the man sunk into himself, whose feet make rings in the water on the ice (‘Blotter’), and the ‘Concrete Cabins’; the dilapidated modernist housing complex by Le Corbusier, hidden in the woods near Briey-en-Forêt.
10 Etsen, 1996

Images
Collection Bonnefantenmuseum
10 Etsen, 1996
Girl in White with Trees, 2001-2002