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Camp color war murals7/25/2023 Here, for example, thinly applied paint in the background contrasts with the thick impasto used for the drifts of snow on the shoreline. They can't be boiled down and defined in language’ - Peter DoigĬamp Forestia is a prime example of ‘Doig relishing the material properties of paint’, Sooke says. ‘If you leave a painting for a year it becomes extremely dry and absorbent and the next layer of paint reacts to that situation in a very different way,’ he explains. It makes sense, then, that his artistic approach is grounded in the plasticity of paint itself: ‘Oil paint has a kind of melting quality, and I love the way that even when it’s dry it’s not really fixed.’ĭoig frequently leaves his paintings dormant for long periods in his studio before returning to them later on. ‘I have made relatively few straight landscapes that didn’t have any architecture, and I always wanted a landscape to be humanised by a person or a building,’ the artist explains.įor Doig, the material properties of paint approximate the sensation of remembering. That structure, to which he returned again and again in his Concrete Cabin series, could conjure nostalgia, loneliness or unease in Doig’s major early paintings, concealed homes induce an uneasy sense of trespassing on private property. The cabin quickly became a central motif in Doig's work. That's what makes the process so fascinating.’ The painting is what it becomes, and when I start, I don’t know what that will be. The place is a kind of portal to possibilities in painting. ‘They're about my idea of what that place is. ‘I don't think my paintings are about Trinidad or Canada,’ Doig has said. Instead they ‘articulate something internal things that are impossible to put into words.’ The wild Canadian landscape - snow, forests, lakes - became a means by which to examine the sprawling wilderness of memory itself. ‘In the 1990s, Doig is often painting scenes that evoke memories of his Canadian childhood.’ But the paintings aren't really records of external scenes and places, Sooke explains. It was in the early 1990s, as Doig’s star was rising on the international art scene, that his works began to evoke the lands of his youth.Ĭamp Forestia is ‘a fantastically strong and self-confident piece of painting,’ says art critic Alastair Sooke. He would remain there for the next decade, before attending art school in London. Studies are held in the Tate, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.Ī native of Scotland, Doig spent five years in Trinidad before moving with his family to Canada. Camp Forestia (1996), offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 6 October at Christie’s in London, is a masterwork dating from a pivotal period in Peter Doig’s practice. Its windows are dark, as if long abandoned the scene is deserted, save for an almost imperceptible figure in the foreground. Against an inky forest, a cabin is reflected in a lake below.
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