Among his own works, Figure in a Mountain Landscape, 1997–98, is a particular favorite of Doig’s. Drawn from a 1935 photograph of the Canadian artist Franklin Carmichael painting from nature, it shows the hooded Carmichael seen from behind. Beyond him is the view he is attempting to capture on his easel. “It was such a struggle,” Doig recalls. “How to make him not too warlock-like or comic.” Ofili remembers Doig calling him one night to “tell me he’d made a big breakthrough. The breakthrough is the figure becoming part of the landscape and the landscape becoming part of the figure. That for me is emblematic when I think of Peter developing his work.” His “exquisite touch,” as Schimmel refers to the way he handles paint, is another striking feature of Doig’s pictures. “You get a sense of not only what he’s painting,” he says, “but of how he’s painting.”
In Trinidad Doig may be geographically isolated, but he’s no Gauguin in Tahiti. For one thing, Doig tells me, Trinidad is not quite the tropical paradise many imagine: Port of Spain is not a resort town, the seas can be rough, and violent crime is on the rise. But it’s also considered the most culturally diverse island in the Caribbean. Ofili calls it “secretive. It’s difficult to figure out what makes this place tick, and for an artist, that is something to feed off.” Doig’s Music of the Future, a brooding work showing groups of people loitering on the savannah, alludes to the island’s nocturnal culture. “I didn’t want to get into the specifics of the people,” he says. “It was more about atmosphere and the feeling of time of night.” The trap in painting Trinidad, he says, lies in exoticizing the ordinary. “You see potential subjects for paintings all the time, but then you wonder if you’re just being seduced by what’s very ordinary. So how do you find your voice here?”
One way is to make himself an integral part of the local scene. A “magpie of culture,” according to Blazwick, Doig runs a film club in his studio with artist Che Lovelace, and he not only selects and screens the films—usually independent fare—but also paints the poster most weeks. It’s a project he finds liberating, he says, “because it’s much more immediate.” Still, Trinidad remains something of an experiment. “I sometimes think that maybe I won’t use these experiences or this information for another 10 years,” Doig tells me over a late lunch of fried shark sandwiches on nearby Maracas Beach. “Maybe it’s too soon. Or maybe I’ve got to become a different kind of painter. Maybe that’s what’s happening.”
