Lot 42 | Peter Doig | "Study for Telemarker"

Winter sports: a hobby of the painter Peter Doig
Peter Doig has been giving new impetus to figurative painting from the last decade of the 20th century to the present day. As a teenager and young adult, he lived for a long time in Canada, where he developed his passion for winter sports, both ice hockey and skiing. At the same time as his artistic breakthrough (Turner Prize Shortlist 1994), the subject of skiing found its way into his painting and became one of his most important sources of motifs. Peter Doig had already worked on the visual appeal of snow in earlier, important works, e.g. in Pink Snow, 1991 (now MoMA, NYC) or in Blotter, 1993 (Walker Art Centre, Liverpool). However, it was the large motif family ‘Ski Jacket’ from 1994, the centrepiece of which is now part of the Tate Gallery collection in London, that marked the beginning of his artistic exploration of skiing.

In a solo exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London in 1996, Peter Doig showed new paintings on the subject of skiing under the title ‘Freestyle’. One of the works shown there was the painting ‘Telemarker’ (Fig.1), subtitled ‘Pas de Chèvre’. The present work is a study of this large-format work.

In the Swiss Alps
A skier skis down a mountain slope overgrown with fir trees. Peter Doig has painted this scene on chamois-coloured paper, mainly in sepia-coloured oil paint, which is heavily diluted in the surface. He only uses pure white heights and green and light blue accents very sparingly.

In contrast to many of his ‘skiers' hidden object paintings’, in which the people's search for a foothold is a deeper level of meaning, here this sportsman is travelling with complete confidence. The title suggests that he is skiing using the telemark technique, i.e. with a ski binding that only fixes the tip of the boot, while the heel can lift off the ski. This elegant technique is increasingly used for touring and deep snow skiing, which is consistent with the subtitle ‘Pas de Chèvre’. This geographical name refers to a mountain pass in the Swiss Alps that is part of the ‘Haute-Route’, a popular ski tour from Chamonix to Zermatt.

The study of the work - a working process
A comparison of the present work on paper with the large-format painting reveals many similarities, but also striking differences. This is evident in the different colour scheme of the painting, which has a strong proportion of yellow, pink and grey.

Irrespective of this, the skier in the work on paper appears more inconspicuous, even more equal in the midst of the mountain world, which is depicted more compactly overall. The skier's legs, which in the large version are clad in bright yellow trousers, are almost timidly outlined in the study and hardly differ from the sepia brown splashes on the piste. A milky glaze lies over the skier's face, almost like a cloud of breath in cold air. Here, too, the hardness of the contour is dissolved. And then there is the lower left corner of the sheet, in which the snow surface is very strongly and roughly structured with sepia colour, creating an immediate proximity to the viewer's position. This corner of the picture is also emphasised in the large painting, but there it is much more discreet.

This ‘Study for Telemarker’ is a wonderfully autonomous work of art that reveals an insight into the working process of the artist Peter Doig. It shows how the artist, who often uses photographs as the starting point for his works, creates a genesis of individual works in a process of omission and re-evaluation.
Alexandra Bresges-Jung