Living in Trinidad has both darkened and brightened his hallucinatory palette. “You can paint a house turquoise and orange, and it doesn’t look strange here because the light is so bright,” he says. “But when I arrived in London to install my Tate show, everything there just felt incredibly muted, almost in soft focus. Sometimes when you bring a painting from here into that environment, it can look a bit garish.”
The island’s vibrant colors and light have clearly “infected” Doig’s recent work, says Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, adding that he’d love to have Doig curate a Gauguin show for the museum. “He is taking forms and images and laying color across them in a way that makes the paintings more abstracted,” Serota says. “He connects with a tradition that goes from Gauguin through German Expressionism to Bacon to Peter Doig: It’s a tradition that is the hovering between representation and abstraction.” Observing him up close, Ofili sees “a deeper level of introspection in his approach now.”
Doig had lived in Trinidad as a child and first returned in 2000, with Ofili, for an artist’s residency. “It felt familiar,” he says, particularly as his father, then an occasional painter, had collected pictures by Trinidadian artists, so even from afar, “Trinidad was always present in our house.” By the time he moved there, partly to give his family some of the childhood he’d known, he had become one of the most sought-after painters of his generation. Unlike Damien Hirst and the other Young British Artists who became overnight sensations in the early Nineties, Doig for years worked under the radar and didn’t show much until age 30, though he was widely admired by his peers. But in 2007, when his 1991 White Canoe, a nighttime scene of a canoe on a lake, was sold at Sotheby’s for $11.3 million—then an auction record for a living European artist—Doig went from being “a hero to other painters to a poster child of the excesses of the market,” says Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The price made Doig “nauseous,” says Schimmel, recalling their discussions. “As an artist you lose a little control of your own identity.” Afterward Doig made a point of telling journalists that he didn’t receive the money; the seller did. Without prompting, Doig refers to the sale, saying “the way auction houses write about paintings as masterpieces seems such an absurd way to talk about a contemporary work of art. I mean, it’s very new. A masterpiece? It was never in my mind that I was trying to create a masterpiece. It was almost anti the idea of a masterpiece.”
Both familiar and strange, Doig’s pictures prompt a sense of dislocation in the viewer, which may owe something to his own rootlessness. Born in Edinburgh to Scottish parents, Doig moved to Trinidad at age two, Montreal at seven, Toronto as a teen and then to London at 19 to study at Central Saint Martins, a decision fueled by the postpunk musicians he admired who came out of art school. Doig’s father was an accountant for a shipping company; his mother, a drama teacher, and at first he considered theater design, thinking it was practical. But he quickly switched to painting, eagerly imbibing the city’s artistic scene, then centered more on nightclubs than galleries. A cinephile, he made lists of films he wanted to see and hit all the revival houses, recalling that “it was amazing the number of films you could see over the course of a year in London” at that time. He worked as a dresser at the English National Opera and appeared in an experimental film by his friend Derek Jarman, while making pictures he recalls as “cartoonlike and urban.” At a time when being a painter was highly unfashionable, Doig had little luck launching his career and moved to Montreal, where he mixed paints for a set design company and later worked on the sets for the horror flick The Amityville Curse. He tried painting the Canadian landscape from life but “felt a bit lost,” he says, and worried that he was becoming a Sunday painter. One day at his parents’ farm outside Toronto, he caught a glimpse of a girl slumped in a canoe on the television. It was a moment from Friday the 13th—which he played back in slow motion so he could photograph it. Soon he’d painted the first of many works inspired by the movie. “It was unlike anything I’d made before,” says Doig, who recently gave the work to Ofili in what he calls “an early days swap.”
