Lot 41 | Peter Doig | "Study for Camp Forestia I"

Peter Doig: Artist and teacher

Peter Doig is currently one of the most sought-after and influential British contemporary figurative artists. Born in Edinburgh, he grew up in Trinidad in the Caribbean and in Canada. His youth was characterised by relocations. He never lived in one house for more than three years and attended nine different schools. At the age of twenty, Doig moved to London, where he studied painting at St Martin's School of Art until 1983. After spending several years in Montreal, he returned to London and completed his studies at the Chelsea School of Art in 1990. In 1991, the young painter's breakthrough came when he was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Prize and a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. In 1994, Peter Doig was one of four artists on the Turner Prize shortlist.

The position of figurative painting represented by Peter Doig, which always radiates a fluctuating uncertainty, hits the nerve of the times. Since then, the leading museums in Europe, Canada and the USA have shown Peter Doig's work in their collections and in solo exhibitions. Peter Doig taught at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 2005 to 2017. Today, the artist lives mainly in Trinidad with his family.

Camp Forestia: A family of pictures is not a cycle

In the mid-1990s, during a decisive phase in Peter Doig's artistic development, a photograph of a clubhouse on a lake in Seattle called ‘Camp Forestia’ became the starting point for a whole series of independent works. Completely different in size, painting technique and image detail, these works also convey very different emotional states.

As in the previous catalogue no. 40, Peter Doig has extremely reduced the image detail compared to the original motif (fig. 1, 2). He dispenses with the reflection of the house in the water, which was originally so essential, as well as the forest and the sky above the scene. The motif is ‘zoomed in’ until all that remains of the house is the left side of the gable wall and the first two supports of the veranda. And of course there is the person, who is probably sitting on a footbridge with his legs crossed. The colour scheme of this variant is reduced to various shades of green, predominantly shimmering into turquoise-blue, and a silvery white, which also contains turquoise. The special application of colour also makes this work a solitaire within the Camp Forestia family: the lime green sections in the veranda area and the shutters have a graphic and visually three-dimensional effect thanks to their glazed application of colour. In contrast, the final coarse finish of the light-coloured wall paint spreads almost organically over the dark bushes and defines their contours. Overall, the impression remains that a more detailed underpainting has been ‘buried’ by the top, coarse application of colour.

Memory and recollection - a common thread in Peter Doig's work

This painting picks up on a central theme of Peter Doig's entire oeuvre: Memory and re-memory, with their loss of detail but compression of atmosphere. Through ever further reduction, the ‘vaporisation’ of a motif as it were, Peter Doig leads his works towards an atmospheric condensation that can evoke emotions in the viewer. The colourfulness can evoke memories of the special atmosphere of full moon nights, of loneliness and of vaguely melting inner images of specially experienced places.

Alexandra Bresges-Jung