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- Peter Doig,
by Clifford Elgin - Doig is an artist who has found acceptance along with a recent wave of figurative painters working from the mid-1990’s to our present. Artists such as Laura Owens and Elizabeth Peyton have opened doors for many young painters that merge the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism with realistic spaces. Doig was raised in Canada and graduated from St. Martin’s of London in 1983. At this time the world art scene was booming in New York with the likes of Salle, Schnabel, Clemente, and Basquiat, who were selling quickly produced works of art. For the most part the paintings that were selling were huge bombastic works. With the exception of Basquiat, most of this work in retrospect is gaudy and to a fault ‘naïve.’ At the time, where Doig was a student, London was still charting its own course. In the 1970’s several artists such as Hockney and Kitaj had made huge impacts with subtle narrative pieces, but it would not be until Saatchi brought in his blockbuster touring show in the mid 90’s that London and Germany joined New York as equals. This Saatchi show also highlighted dozens of artists working with narrative themes and helped form an idea of just what postmodernism was. Saatchi has been such a force over the last two decades that he has pushed art in the directions that he sees fit, not unlike the insurmountable will of Greenburg in the Abstract Expressionist days. Recently, Saatchi has turned his eyes towards narrative/figurative painting, and Doig has been one of the beneficiaries.
- Mostly London in the early 80’s was a quiet area that was producing abstracts and figurative work in the Freud manner. “When I first started, figurative painting was pretty much off the agenda, and the painting that did happen there was quite localized, British painting. Almost like a kind of lyrical abstraction.1” Doig moved back to Canada, settled down for a while, and eventually enrolled as a graduate student in Chelsea. Like many of the exciting figurative painters today, Doig relies heavily on a mystery of place. The viewer is never quite sure where the scene is or exactly what is happening. For the most part the figures are caught in the mundane aspects of everyday life. Doig says that his figures are “like a cipher. The figure, in a way is a form and the figure is a cipher, its something you are meant to melt into. It’s not really about expression, its more about body language… you look through the faces rather than stay on the surface.1” As an artist, Doig uses photographs as inspiration for his work. Thorough his own as well as found photographs; Doig lays out a loose composition that is based on the image, though in the end his work relies primarily upon his unique brushwork. “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.2”
- It’s interesting to correlate the narrative figurative painting of today with the last great wave of narrative figure painting. To do so, I would say that you would have to look back at the French Salon. Yes, you can say that Matisse and Picasso used the figure in just about every painting. But it could also be argued that Matisse and Picasso were using the figure as prop devices, and except in rare occasions such as in La Guernica, the figures often do not evoke a story. Their paintings were about (simple explanation here) pushing boundaries and exploring new ways of seeing color or shapes. I would argue that over the last hundred and fifty years painting has circled back upon itself. Artists such as Doig have ended up re-examining the traditional narrative while incorporating the mannerisms of preceding movements. “His work is not a reverence to media, style, or art discussions, but creates a new relationship between painting and reality, on e the at has to be determined a new, and whose point of reference is the viewer’s own experience.3”
An article on Peter Doig, brought to you by thoughts on art
