Dr Barnaby Wright (BA 1999, MA 2000, PhD 2005), Deputy Head of The Courtauld Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th Century Art, talks about his visits to Peter Doig’s studio as he prepared for his ground-breaking exhibition at The Courtauld.
Moving studios is a major event for a painter. Everything, from the way the light falls to where you clean your brushes, is different. When you are settled in a studio the noise of all those differences becomes muted by familiarity and you have a quieter space to get on with the business of painting. Of course, that isn’t the half of it. In a new studio you have no personal history, no sense of having made your marks there before. Your memories of past creative achievements and failures are associated with elsewhere. These things matter to an artist. How much and to what effect depends on the artist.
Peter Doig has recently moved studio. In fact, more than that, he has moved continents. For the past twenty years, Doig’s main home and studio have been in Trinidad, his work entwined with his life there. In 2021, he made the decision to move, keeping his studio in Trinidad but setting up a new principal studio in London. For him, it is a double dislocation – new studio and a change of country. Doig is no stranger to change. Turn to the chronology section of any publication on him and you find a list of moves. 1959 – born in Edinburgh; 1960 – moves to Trinidad; 1966 – moves to Canada; 1979 – moves to London; 1986 – moves to Montreal; 1989 – moves to London; 2002 – moves to Trinidad; and now we add, 2021 – moves to London.
A more detailed chronology would also add numerous travels, including time spent in New York and his period as professor at the Fine Art Academy in Düsseldorf. All these moves have become part of how Doig thinks of himself. As he once put it, ‘I’ve always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I’d feel a complete foreigner.’
Feeling like an outsider can be an alienating, even hostile experience. At the same time, it can make you see and think differently, it can deepen your attachment to a place and the people around you. These are characteristics of Doig’s art. His paintings and prints often express a powerful feeling of place and presence. But they do so at a remove that creates a changing atmosphere of closeness and distance, familiarity and strangeness. Doig paints imposing figures in evocative settings, works that seem to belong both to the world of things seen and experienced, and things remembered and imagined. His use of paint is remarkably well attuned to these shifts of perception and feeling. Doig’s paintings and prints do not so much represent things for us, rather they sweep us up into a waking dream where everything feels vivid, but nothing is quite fixed or can be taken for granted.
For the past year and more, Doig has been working on paintings in his new London studio destined for the exhibition at The Courtauld. I have been lucky enough to visit him there a few times during this period of – perhaps we should call it, renewed change. When I first visited, not long after he had moved in, I think I expected to see fresh canvases ready to be painted. I’d forgotten that Doig’s paintings can often take years to be finished, sometimes with significant changes made late on in the process. So, what I actually saw, alongside brand-new canvases, was a group of remarkable, large-scale paintings in different stages of completion that had been brought over from Trinidad and from New York (where he worked for a while) to be developed further in London. A painting of a Trinidadian music store, one of the island’s fishing boats, a large bather figure based on a photograph of Robert Mitchum, a beautiful small portrait of Doig’s friend, the late poet Derek Walcott, and others besides. Some of these works had been started several years ago.
Continue reading in the latest issue of The Courtauld News…
