Peter Doig

“I never try to create real spaces – only painted spaces. That’s all I am interested in. That may be why there is never really any specific time or place in my paintings.” (Peter Doig cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, Peter Doig, Charley’s Space, 2003, p. 33)

The most significant painting by the artist to come to auction in recent years, Iron Hill is an early example of the inventive approach to painting which has secured Peter Doig a position of pre-eminent importance within the current critical cannon. One of the few British artists to be included in the reopening hang at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005 and with work included in this year’s Whitney Biennial and the Tate Triennial, Doig is today universally recognised as a pacemaker of his generation, an unerring champion of the poignancy and relevance of oil painting in our increasingly media-saturated visual environment.

An early paradigm of Doig’s precocious talent, Iron Hill is seminal in the strictest sense of the word, a blueprint that laid the foundations for Doig’s best work to date. Shortly after graduating from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1990, Doig was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Prize, which comprised a travel bursary and culminated in a solo exhibition at London’s celebrated Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991. The prospect of such a major institutional exhibition at such a formative stage in his career spurred an epiphanic period in that year, in which Doig produced a small number of large canvases which he now sees as the thematic matrix for his subsequent oeuvre. The recurrent themes that resurface in Doig’s work up to the present day all find their source in the Whitechapel show, which included Architect’s Home in the Ravine, Concrete Cabin (the first ‘cabin’ painting based on Le Corbusier’s architecture), and Iron Hill, which is the most ambitious and resolved of a cluster of paintings, beginning with Hill Houses (now in the British Council Collection), based on the Quebecois landscape around Doig’s parental home.

While this vast, all-encompassing depiction of the expansive natural landscape doubtless engages with the grand tradition of landscape painting, it is Doig’s departure from the representational mode that is his lasting achievement. The romanticised wildernesses of Caspar David Friedrich, the wrought painterly surfaces of Monet’s informal plein air oil sketches and the vehement use of colour employed by the Canadian Group of Seven all find their correlatives here; however, Doig is primarily an imagistic painter and this rendering of the Canadian landscape, far from representational, is based more on memory and associative images than topographical veracity. Like many artists, Doig is a collector of images and he works from a visual archive of pictures and photographs culled from newspapers, postcards, film and album covers. Unlike his plein air forefathers a century before him, distance and detachment from his subject are essential prerequisites of his artistic practice. In his innovative, studio-based approach to image making, an initially vague but guiding thought gradually links the painterly process with an image from his expansive visual repertoire. In the case of Iron Hill, Doig’s source image was a photograph of houses in Maine taken from the National Geographic. Estranged from its original context, this photograph of unfamiliar American houses provided the catalyst for a concatenation of heady childhood reminiscences, the two meshing together in a combination which served as a guideline in the construction of his entirely fictitious landscape. As the artist explains: “I think the way that the paintings come out is more a way of trying to depict an image that is not about reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of a scene and something that is in your head.” (ibid., p. 18)

It is the non-specific nature of the landscape in Iron Hill which invites the beholder to share in the mental terrain of the picture plain. Our seemingly unnatural, elevated perspective distances us from the countryside surrounding this hamlet, which attains a superlative scale and epic grandeur redolent of the empty and sublime landscapes of Freidrich. Dwarfed by nature, mankind’s increment on the landscape only reinforces nature’s dominance. Twilight – the contemplative hour – hangs in the sparkling sky, the luminescent glow of the hilltop conurbation the only sign of life aside from the abstracted forms of the headlamps descending the hillside.

One of the defining characteristics of Doig’s painterly virtuosity is his ability to marry process and image, deftly creating a tension between the content of a painting and its abstract possibilities. Deriving figuration from abstraction (and vice versa), Doig creates a varied painterly surface whose all-over finish constantly shifts and changes. Translucent layers of paint build up, traces of colour seem to disperse and sink, seeping and bleeding into one another and running down the canvas in serendipitous arabesques. In places earthy, elsewhere the surface positively glistens, a rich tapestry of textural diversity. Exquisite passages of adroit representation, such as the depiction of the houses in the immediate foreground, coexist alongside mires of looser abstraction where the numerous trickles and runs of paint, alongside the wilful flaws in the finish, counter the illusion of naturalistic representation. Like Monet’s late depictions of water lilies in Giverny, the intricately veiled layers of paint and rich impasto create a remarkable sense of illusionistic depth while simultaneously insisting on the real space, the flat planar surface of the canvas and the paint itself. While in certain works, such as Architect’s Home in the Ravine, this flatness is achieved by the meshing together of foreground and background in a Pollockian matrix of colour, in Iron Hill, the overt frontality of the picture plane derives from the painting’s pseudo-naïve composition which collapses true perspective thereby dispelling any true sense of illusionistic space. In this levelling of the composition, the road running up the right flank of the composition becomes an abstract form, an outright rejection of repoussoir effect and perspectival recession which forces the viewer to consider the work in purely abstract terms.