Peter Doig

A gift from the artist to the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is hinged to the backing mount on all four corners. There are artist's pinholes to the upper right and two lower corners and the sheet undulates very slightly towards the centre of the right edge. Close inspection reveals a few faint handling creases and minute tears towards the outer edges, which are likely to be original to the work's execution.
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Executed in a combination of thickly painted and watered down washes of deep ocean blue and an intense lime green, Untitled (Study for Milky Way) was painted by Peter Doig between 1989 and 1990 as a preparatory study for a work on canvas – one of the artist´s best known works, Milky Way - from the same years. Archetypal of his working method, the present work, and the painting it is a study for, were inspired by an amalgamation of influences and memories, a collection of autobiographical and extraneous elements that Doig deftly integrated into his composition. The artist has recalled how “the tree line in Milky Way is a mixture of what I could see from my working space in my parent’s barn and other sketches I made of Northern-looking pines and dying trees. The idea was the trees were illuminated by city light or artificial light from afar - I had just read Don Delillo’s White Noise that influenced the light in these paintings as well (…) At the time I rode my bike every day to Chelsea along the Embankment and was looking a lot at Whistler’s quick washy paintings (…) The stars themselves came from a star chart [from] one of my fellow students. They represented the Milky Way in November which was when I painted them in” (Peter Doig quoted in: Adeline Amar, Peter Doig’s Milky Way, National Galleries Scotland, 25 November 2015, online). 

Doig was studying his Masters Degree at Chelsea School of Art at the time, and his paintings from those years are infused with bold combinations of colour and texture, where thinner layers of brushwork reveal undertones of varied chromatic ranges and thicker areas add an almost illusory depth to the composition. Here, the artist has applied thinner layers of deep viridian-blue in urgent brushstrokes, which appear as moving sky and water. Mirroring the upper half of the composition, the reflection of the starry night seems to dance in the swerving lake beneath. The artist would add a canoe to the final composition in Milky Way, a motif that was inspired by a scene in Sean S. Cunningham´s 1980 film Friday the 13^th where a character drowns in a lake. Compositional traits – such as the lake or the colours in the present work – have reappeared in some of Doig’s most well known works, as the artist has been known to revisit themes that interest him in multiple occasions. The division of the composition in three distinct bands of colour is likewise found in some of the artist’s most important works, such as Grande Riviere (2001-02), 100 Years Ago (Carrera) (2001) or Country Rock (1998-99), and finds its origin in the artist’s admiration of Barnett Newman’s horizontal ‘zips’ of saturated colour. One could recognise, too, echoes of Matisse’s saturated palette, or Munch’s swirling line, both artists who the artist has expressed great admiration for. Indeed, in its intense blend of colour and collection of fragments of Doig’s own virtual memory, Untitled (Study for Milky Way) is a striking demonstration of the artist’s unique painterly skill at the very outset of his career.