Peter Doig

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Dublin, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Almost Grown, 2000, n.p., no. 2, illustrated in colour and titled incorrectly as Untitled (Pond Painting)
Vancouver, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada; Toronto, The Power Plant, Peter Doig, 2001-02, p. 34, illustrated in colour
Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, (on temporary loan 2002 - 2008)

Adrien Searle, et al., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The illustration fails to convey the very rich textural surface of the painting. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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A consummate exhibition in the handling of paint and a spectacular composition spanning a monumental canvas, Almost Grown ranks in the very highest tier of Peter Doig's prodigious repertoire of portentous landscapes. The dense tapestry of painterly techniques in which the layers of imagery are immersed gradually begins to unravel, revealing a landscape painting of phenomenal power and irresistible attraction. The source of the subject here is the landscape of the farm of Doig's parents, near Cobourg and the shore of Lake Ontario near Toronto. The artist's upbringing in the rural tranquillity of Canada has served as catalyst for many of his best known works, and the pond featured at the centre of Almost Grown is also the subject of the celebrated painting Blotter of 1993, which is now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

The present work crystallises Doig's very best painting in its physical layering of surface upon surface, resulting in a work that is replete with vestiges of memory and experience. The rich bands of underlying colour - sumptuous ochre oranges at top and bottom demarcating broad stripes of frosty iridescent turquoise and a wall of powdery snow white – are overlaid with the stark silhouettes of textured branches, which glow a luscious deep purple towards the right. These stratified framing devices are set off dramatically by the delicately descriptive draughtsmanship of the solitary figure standing at the edge of the small pond near a diminutive structure that is almost entirely enveloped by a snow drift. These finely balanced compositional elements are relayed through the accumulation of intricately veiled layers of paint, with traces of colour seeming to disperse and sink, seep and bleed into one another and running down the canvas in serendipitous arabesques. At the same time, densely worked skeins and impasto blobs create a palpable sense of depth in the landscape while also re-emphasising the flatness of the canvas and the nature of the paint material itself. The paint surface positively glistens as it reflects the constantly changing light cast on it, and occasionally dissolves into abstraction in an emotionally charged chromatic display.

The vast expanse of the canvas affords a monumental rendition of nature that dwarfs the tiny child-like figure in their red hat and gloves staring out directly at the viewer: an emblem for humankind's minute place in nature. In a certain respect this continues the Romanticist notion of the insignificance of man before untamed nature, famously made incarnate by Caspar David Friedrich's iconic painting The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog of 1818. The exaggerated sense of the figure's lonely isolation here is accentuated by the dramatic pictorial framing devices of the slender tree trunks that vertically divide the composition, which in turn determine our viewing perspective as spectators. We are positioned as if hiding amid the shadowy thicket, in the shadow of the tall trees and engulfed by foliage. This implied concealment imbues the scene with heavy suspense, and transforms us into both voyeur and fugitive, simultaneously hiding from and spying on the scene beyond our camouflaged refuge.

The lone shed-like cabin glimpsed at the back of the scene behind the figure illustrates Adrian Searle's observation that buildings in Doig's oeuvre can function as vehicles of human emotion: "As well as representing places where people can be found, they also substitute for the figure itself - as signs of human ingenuity, taste, a certain mentality. They invite speculation about the unseen, the lives going on inside their walls, the dramas and secrets they conceal" (Adrien Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 16). Indeed, the indication of this building reignites Doig's well-established juxtaposition of architecture versus nature, setting order against chaos and construction against decay.

A group of three somewhat discoloured photographic sources from the artist's studio show the basic topographical template for Almost Grown, but do not provide an exact source. As is evident from the artist's accompanying sketches, he has taken these photos as the catalyst for the painting, but has developed the composition using the memory of a familiar place as well as his imagination. Almost Grown is thus half artificial construction and half accurate representation, mediating a loaded space between perception and reality. Doig strikes an imperceptible balance between figuration and abstraction and although rooted in the artist's autobiography, the non-specific nature of this landscape invites us into its partly remembered and partly imagined atmosphere. The defining features here do not provide sufficient definition to allocate this scene a singular identity: rather we are irresistibly drawn into shared cognition of a generically familiar place. 

Doig works devotedly from a visual archive of pictures and photographs culled from newspapers, postcards, film and album covers. Physical distance from his subject is essential and by borrowing from reproductions the artist is able to manipulate expectation and reaction, and frequently conjures a poignant sense of imminent revelation via this dramatic vocabulary. This painting's composition is rooted in the aesthetics of film, and it taps directly into a shared visual culture informed by home-video and the amateur family snapshot. As with other masterworks in Doig's canon, his re-interpretation of photography and film defines this painting as a fundamentally contemporary and Post Modern enterprise that knowingly appropriates the recognition of a pre-existing visual language.

Almost Grown further illustrates Doig's tremendous capacity to absorb and interpret the history of art. One of the oldest genres of formal painting, the landscape offers the opportunity for endless adaptation and reinvention. This painting finds aesthetic parallels with a host of artistic precedent, from the Post Impressionists and Paul Gauguin, to Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch and the German Expressionists, to the early twentieth century Canadian Group of Seven and Tom Thomson to Jackson Pollock's physicality of paint and the visceral colouristic assault of Mark Rothko. Doig never reverts to parody or direct quotation of these departed masters, but the inherent character of his obsession with paint and his ceaseless drive to redevelop the parameters of visual expression place him as the clear heir to this formidable line.

Meshing together contemporary imagery with the lessons of art history, with Almost Grown Doig generates a nostalgia that photography alone could never capture. Nevertheless, the sheer physicality of his painting's surface combined with his overtly contemporary imagery signals his intention to continue the genre of landscape painting while substantially changing its representational and symbolic values. A Scottish-born artist who had spent the first twenty years of his life in Canada, with Almost Grown Doig consciously re-visits the landscape of his youth. In this context the painting's title clearly references the rites of passage necessary to undertake during the laborious 'growing up' process. It is therefore possible to see the red-gloved figure as a young Peter Doig, the artist authoring a highly revelatory portrait of a former self.

This work came at the end of an extraordinarily successful decade that saw Doig graduate from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1990, winning the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Prize, which led to a solo exhibition at the gallery in 1991, and being short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1994. Almost ten years later Doig's success has continued unabated, his work having been included in the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005, the 2006 Whitney Biennial and Tate Triennial, and a retrospective at the Tate Gallery last year. With works such as Almost Grown being situated right at the heart of twenty years of uninterrupted critical acclaim, Doig is today universally recognised as an unerring champion of the relevance of oil painting in our increasingly image-saturated visual world.