One of the most influential and sought-after painters working today, Peter Doig creates heavily-worked canvases that imbue natural landscapes and urban settings with a richly strange atmosphere. Working from photographs or found sources like record covers or film stills--as in his famous "canoe" series, based on an eerie lake scene from "Friday the 13th"--Doig often uses the same image multiple times, each version underscoring a new or different detail. A sense of flashback, memory, and nostalgia pervades his work, and his use of uncanny and unexpected color lends a mystical, dream-like, even … (read more)

One of the most influential and sought-after painters working today, Peter Doig creates heavily-worked canvases that imbue natural landscapes and urban settings with a richly strange atmosphere. Working from photographs or found sources like record covers or film stills--as in his famous "canoe" series, based on an eerie lake scene from "Friday the 13th"--Doig often uses the same image multiple times, each version underscoring a new or different detail. A sense of flashback, memory, and nostalgia pervades his work, and his use of uncanny and unexpected color lends a mystical, dream-like, even hallucinatory quality in the scenes portrayed.

"People often say that my paintings remind them of particular scenes from films or from certain passages from books, but I think it’s a different thing altogether," Doig has said. "There is something more primal about painting." In addition to alluding to a continuum of cultural, art-historical, and social reference points in his work, Doig also weaves in aspects of his personal life, particularly his experiences in Tahiti, where he moved in 2002 (British painter Chris Ofili, a friend of Doig's, moved there as well). The resulting scenes can combine cosmopolitan living with dense wilderness and mundane activities, like ping pong or snowboarding, with lushly Fauvist or Impressionist backdrops, conveying a sense of magical realism.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1959, Doig spent much of his childhood in Canada, where he was influenced by the country's Group of Seven, an association of landscape painters in the 1920s. He then went to London in 1979 to study at the Wimbledon School of Art and subsequently earned an MA at the Chelsea School of Art in 1990. Doig gained renown when he won first prize at the Liverpool John Moores University exhibition with his painting, Blotter, in 1993, and in 1994 he was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2007 he briefly became the most expensive living European painter when his 1991 White Canoe sold at auction to Ukrainian industrialist Victor Pinchuk for nearly $11 million. Doig, who on the side runs a film club out of his Trinidad studio with fellow artist Che Lovelace, is represented by the Victoria Miro Gallery in London and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York.

Further Reading:

Click here to read a New York Times article on the record-breaking sale of White Canoe

Click here to read a profile of Doig in the Guardian

Click here to read another profile of Doig in W magazine

Watch the artist discuss his 2008 retrospective at the Tate:

Watch a lengthy discussion between Doig and curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson:

Watch a video tour of Doig's 2009 show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, courtesy of James Kalm (skip the annoying first part):

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