Peter Doig

"I think the way that the paintings come out is more a way of trying to depict an image that is not about a reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of a scene and something that is in your head."

Peter Doig in Exhibition Catalogue, Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum and travelling, Peter Doig, Charley's Space, 2003-2004, p. 18

Executed around the same time as Swamped and White Canoe, the two canoe paintings which have so powerfully entered the public sub-conscious, Grasshopper shows another side to Peter Doig's wondrous poetry of landscape painting. All of these paintings were executed during Peter's last year at Chelsea School of Art and in his preparation for his first solo show, The Whitechapel Artist Award in 1991. The prospect of such a major institutional show at such an epiphanic period of creativity spurred Doig to produce a small number of large canvases which he now sees as the thematic matrix for his subsequent oeuvre. Defining his path as one in which he would tackle the grand history of landscape painting, Doig examined many of his predecessors in depth, assimilated their techniques and ideas into his own and embarked on several roads of potential discovery. Here, one can sense the disparate ghosts of Edward Hopper, Barnett Newman and Gerhard Richter all hovering in the background but there is no doubting that this is a completely new approach to landscape painting. Doig's output is sparse and highly considered and the few paintings he made that year are infused with a rich seam of different ideas, many of which are played out on singular canvases.

Grasshopper seems to be the first of a series of paintings which focused on the horizontally striped composition which would be adopted for such landmark paintings as The House that Jacques Built (Collection of Tel Aviv Museum of Art) in 1992 and Daytime Astronomy (Private Collection, London). For their influence, Doig has referred to Barnett Newman's 'zip'. In Newman's work, the vertical 'zip' or stripe referred to the sublime in an era when Abstract Expressionism searched for extremes of human mood and feeling within colour and the non-figurative image. Newman's stripes represented indispensable streaks of light within fields of colour. Doig has stated that "I did like the idea that maybe these sections which had opened up to reveal a strip of existence could just as easily close down again" (Peter Doig in Exhibition Catalogue, Kiel, Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Nürnberg, Kunsthalle; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Peter Doig Blizzard Seventy-Seven, 1998, p. 70). 

When confronted with the breathtaking expanse of Grasshopper, one is immediately aware of the three equally spaced bands that command its composition. Broadly coloured yet intricately detailed, this device appears to mimic the geological strata which construct the earth. Rather than providing us with a geographical survey of the earth and the divisions of various stones from which it is made, Doig has used the device to divide the composition into three basic layers from which it is formed. The top band contains the abstraction of the sky, created from thin veils of vivid blue masked with successive layers of dragged and dabbed paint reminiscent of Gerhard Richter. The middle band contains the land, a small settlement isolated in the desert of an arid landscape, the telegraph poles and lines the only clue to the connection with the developed world. Infused with a rich warmth of light, this is a nameless landscape in the middle of a barren land, of no specific time. Reminiscent of Hopper at his best, one is instantly reminded of the painting Railroad Sunset from 1929 both in the warm hues of light which imply the setting sun and the lonely building trapped in the epic landscape. These two upper bands drift effortlessly over the lower band which appears to show the sub-strata of rock formations beneath the surface cast with a watery reflection of the landscape which looms above.

Symmetrical in terms of size and treatment, both the upper and lower bands energise the existence of the middle band in much the same way as it infuses them with moments of reflection and influence.   In direct contrast to many of his compatriots involved in the explosion of British art onto the global artistic agenda during the 1990s, Peter Doig's paintings are infused with an understated subtlety and quiet. They are journeys of discovery, labours of love which, through the gradual accumulation of veils of liquid colour and different techniques of paint application, painstakingly link histories of painterly influence in much the same way as the landscape he depicts have resulted from centuries of geological actions.

The title Grasshopper, one which has been adopted intermittently throughout his career, refers to the viewpoint of this tiny insect whose perspective of the world is formed at ground level, and as such has a microscopic view of the intricacies of the earth together with a magnified view of the human world and the sky. Swamped by the size of the landscape which enshrouds it, the blink of an eyelid or a slight movement can completely alter its perception. One can just as easily apply this metaphor to an artist attempting to make new paintings under the huge weight of art history. Buzzing with energy, every inch of canvas shows an artist testing the boundaries of the depiction of the real with different abstract processes of painterly application. Within a broad framework of high figuration, Doig's paintings inter-weave a rich variety of influences, which on the one hand reflect his submersion in the Art, Film and Photography of contemporary culture, and on the other, his upbringing in the rural tranquillity of Canada.

As such, Grasshopper manages to materialise an entire human world within the confines of a picture frame in much the same way as Newman proposed an entire world of human feeling. From a simple starting point, Doig has created a painting whose thoroughly figurative appearance is concocted from a number of abstract devices and processes which are thinly woven into the dense layering of the painting. The rich kaleidoscope of colour, the looping skeins and the palette-knifed drags, at once create a remarkable sense of grand depth within the landscape whilst also re-emphasising its real geographical space and make-up in relation to the flatness of the canvas and the nature of paint itself.