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Lot Essay
'Somehow he is painting the space that is behind the eyes. It's as if you were lying in bed trying hard to remember what something looked like. And [Pierre] Bonnard managed to paint that strange state. It is not a photographic space at all. It is a memory space, but one which is based on reality'
(P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 142).
'I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there, but it's not a scientific process. I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of. We have all seen incredible sunsets. We've all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects, and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting... When I was making the 'snow' paintings I was looking a lot at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour'
(P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132).
Enshrouded in a blizzard, a single figure is just about visible through the blur of the falling snow. With the gentle texture of its intensively applied dots of yellow and white building a Pointilist optical illusion, White Out is a painting whose physicality and pictorial vision reflects the sensation of its title. Although from distance there is an overall coherence to the blurred scene, up close areas of white dots on yellow interact with other areas of yellow dots on white to play with the eye's perception in manner not dissimilar from Op-Art. As such, Doig is again using an apparently straight forward figurative scene to adopt abstract strategies and techniques which blur the boundaries between the two modes and provide a whole new approach to painting. Executed in 1992, the work was conceived the same year as Doig's breakout on the international art scene, captured in a feature article in Frieze magazine. Created at this climatic moment, White Out has been exhibited widely including at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen and Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris. White Out sits within the pantheon of other great snow paintings from this period recalling his Canadian upbringing including The House that Jacques Built (1991), Pond Life (1992) and Blotter (1993, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Timeless and tranquil, this is painting as a reflection of sensations - Doig captures the chill of a frosted winter scene, the figure blurred through the densely falling snow. With Doig's figure emerging from a halo of whirling snowflakes, White Out draws many similarities with Blotter and Pond Life, both of which are derived from a photograph of the artist's brother. An opus of textures, Doig's characteristic application of sprays and glazes from this period captures the very elemental qualities of the atmospheric conditions created by snow and the substance itself through the materiality of paint. Filling gaps in representational figuration, Doig's technique of juxtaposing textures through the layering of glazes, spots and sprays lends itself to his atmospheric-abstracted style by undermining the conventional order of pictorial space.
Operating on the cusp of figuration and abstraction, White Out, is a psychological construct, persuasively conveying not just an image but a sensory response as well. Referring back to the entire universe of art history, references in White Out can be found in such diverse periods as Romanticism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Op-Art. White Out is most conceptually informed by pointillism; indeed, upon close examination, it is evident that Doig presents us with an optical illusion. By juxtaposing white against the yellow, Doig employs the same reductive colour theory as the Post-Impressionists, imbuing pure light into the canvas. Here Doig distinguishes his painting from the opticality of its late 19th century counterparts by painting in veils, building up layers of yellow and white with such dexterity that it becomes impossible to tell where yellow ends and white begins. In the proliferation of freely painted dots, Doig goes beyond simple colour theory, engaging the viewer with his work by conveying the sensation that your vision is actually obscured by the densely falling snow. In doing so, Doig reflects the sensation of looking through a white out. 'I think the way that the paintings come out is more a way of trying to depict an image that is not about a reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of a scene and something that is in your head' Doig explains, 'I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there, but it's not a scientific process. I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of. We have all seen incredible sunsets. We've all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects, and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting...When I was making the 'snow' paintings I was looking a lot at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour' (P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132). White Out would seem to have been conceived in direct response to this experience, reflected in the artist's particular choice of brilliant yellow for the ground his snowscape.
The way in which Doig conveys his imagery is evocative of Claude Monet's studies of haystacks or Chartres Cathedral under various light and weather conditions, but extrapolates to the emotive characteristics of colour that finds its legacies in German Romanticism and ultimately in the meditative landscapes of Edvard Munch. The idiosyncratic colour palette employed by the artist while reminiscent of the depiction of landscapes by Post-Impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard-also adds a psychic dimension which sets Doig's practice apart from this world and brings the pigment to life. Just as Bonnard so masterfully achieved, Doig expresses his own ambition: 'somehow he is painting the space that is behind the eyes. It's as if you were lying in bed trying hard to remember what something looked like. And Bonnard managed to paint that strange state. It is not a photographic space at all. It is a memory space, but one which is based on reality' (P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 142).
As much a study of the colour properties of white as snow itself, in White Out Doig progressively builds up layers of paint against a brilliant yellow background, allowing the snow to cloak the landscape, nearly concealing the outline of the solitary figure and the towering wilderness that lies beyond. Blotted and bespeckled, snow nearly erases the landscape, becoming so heavy in places as to make the small spots of yellow shining through appear as snow itself. Creating a slippage between foreground and background, figuration and abstraction, Doig's image is both familiar and estranged, engaging the viewer - piquing their curiosity, entreating them to search the canvas for decipherable figures within the snowscape. Of this quality in his work the artist has said, 'although the paintings are derived from the real world this is just the starting point. It is an entry or structure that is recognizable and familiar for the viewer and myself and therefore gives the painting a beginning that is tangible. This then allows the intangibles or the atmosphere of the painting to exist. I am never setting out to create a real space - only ever a painted one. Maybe this is why there is never really a specific time or space (or sometimes season) in the paintings as such, even though, if one was to see the actual source, it would be 'real'' (P. Doig, quoted in G. Mackert, 'Peter Doig' in Dear Painter, paint me..., exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 2002, p. 184).
Continuing to explore themes of representation and memory in Doig's practice, White Out is a disorientating scene where visibility is so obscured by heavy snow that all points of reference are eclipsed through the diffused light of a continuous white cloud layer, a visual analogy for memory recall. Doig employs snow as a symbolic tool referring to the hazy quality often experienced when recalling visual imagery. In the process, these memories become suffused with emotive undertows, a quality which Doig conveys through his own technique of melding positive and negative space. 'The snow was always a way of almost creating a negative space or a screen to be forced to look through or a distance from the subject within' Doig explains, 'I was completely surprised at how seductive it was to paint and also to look at and how it could create genuine atmosphere even though it is in some way such an abstract device' (P. Doig, quoted in G. Mackert, 'Peter Doig' in Dear Painter, paint me..., exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 2002, p. 184). With an ability to draw upon a wealth of art historical references, Doig's snow-screen also finds precedent in Bruegel the Elder's Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, 1563. Of the old master's work Doig has noted, 'when you look at [Bruegel's painting,] the snow is almost all the same size, it's not perspectival, it's this notion of the 'idea' of snow, which I like. It becomes like a screen, making you look through it.' (P. Doig, quoted in L. Edelstein, 'Peter Doig: Losing Oneself in the Looking', in Flash Art 31, May-June 1998, p. 86).
(P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 142).
'I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there, but it's not a scientific process. I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of. We have all seen incredible sunsets. We've all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects, and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting... When I was making the 'snow' paintings I was looking a lot at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour'
(P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132).
Enshrouded in a blizzard, a single figure is just about visible through the blur of the falling snow. With the gentle texture of its intensively applied dots of yellow and white building a Pointilist optical illusion, White Out is a painting whose physicality and pictorial vision reflects the sensation of its title. Although from distance there is an overall coherence to the blurred scene, up close areas of white dots on yellow interact with other areas of yellow dots on white to play with the eye's perception in manner not dissimilar from Op-Art. As such, Doig is again using an apparently straight forward figurative scene to adopt abstract strategies and techniques which blur the boundaries between the two modes and provide a whole new approach to painting. Executed in 1992, the work was conceived the same year as Doig's breakout on the international art scene, captured in a feature article in Frieze magazine. Created at this climatic moment, White Out has been exhibited widely including at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen and Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris. White Out sits within the pantheon of other great snow paintings from this period recalling his Canadian upbringing including The House that Jacques Built (1991), Pond Life (1992) and Blotter (1993, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Timeless and tranquil, this is painting as a reflection of sensations - Doig captures the chill of a frosted winter scene, the figure blurred through the densely falling snow. With Doig's figure emerging from a halo of whirling snowflakes, White Out draws many similarities with Blotter and Pond Life, both of which are derived from a photograph of the artist's brother. An opus of textures, Doig's characteristic application of sprays and glazes from this period captures the very elemental qualities of the atmospheric conditions created by snow and the substance itself through the materiality of paint. Filling gaps in representational figuration, Doig's technique of juxtaposing textures through the layering of glazes, spots and sprays lends itself to his atmospheric-abstracted style by undermining the conventional order of pictorial space.
Operating on the cusp of figuration and abstraction, White Out, is a psychological construct, persuasively conveying not just an image but a sensory response as well. Referring back to the entire universe of art history, references in White Out can be found in such diverse periods as Romanticism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Op-Art. White Out is most conceptually informed by pointillism; indeed, upon close examination, it is evident that Doig presents us with an optical illusion. By juxtaposing white against the yellow, Doig employs the same reductive colour theory as the Post-Impressionists, imbuing pure light into the canvas. Here Doig distinguishes his painting from the opticality of its late 19th century counterparts by painting in veils, building up layers of yellow and white with such dexterity that it becomes impossible to tell where yellow ends and white begins. In the proliferation of freely painted dots, Doig goes beyond simple colour theory, engaging the viewer with his work by conveying the sensation that your vision is actually obscured by the densely falling snow. In doing so, Doig reflects the sensation of looking through a white out. 'I think the way that the paintings come out is more a way of trying to depict an image that is not about a reality, but one that is somehow in between the actuality of a scene and something that is in your head' Doig explains, 'I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there, but it's not a scientific process. I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of. We have all seen incredible sunsets. We've all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects, and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting...When I was making the 'snow' paintings I was looking a lot at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour' (P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132). White Out would seem to have been conceived in direct response to this experience, reflected in the artist's particular choice of brilliant yellow for the ground his snowscape.
The way in which Doig conveys his imagery is evocative of Claude Monet's studies of haystacks or Chartres Cathedral under various light and weather conditions, but extrapolates to the emotive characteristics of colour that finds its legacies in German Romanticism and ultimately in the meditative landscapes of Edvard Munch. The idiosyncratic colour palette employed by the artist while reminiscent of the depiction of landscapes by Post-Impressionists such as Pierre Bonnard-also adds a psychic dimension which sets Doig's practice apart from this world and brings the pigment to life. Just as Bonnard so masterfully achieved, Doig expresses his own ambition: 'somehow he is painting the space that is behind the eyes. It's as if you were lying in bed trying hard to remember what something looked like. And Bonnard managed to paint that strange state. It is not a photographic space at all. It is a memory space, but one which is based on reality' (P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 142).
As much a study of the colour properties of white as snow itself, in White Out Doig progressively builds up layers of paint against a brilliant yellow background, allowing the snow to cloak the landscape, nearly concealing the outline of the solitary figure and the towering wilderness that lies beyond. Blotted and bespeckled, snow nearly erases the landscape, becoming so heavy in places as to make the small spots of yellow shining through appear as snow itself. Creating a slippage between foreground and background, figuration and abstraction, Doig's image is both familiar and estranged, engaging the viewer - piquing their curiosity, entreating them to search the canvas for decipherable figures within the snowscape. Of this quality in his work the artist has said, 'although the paintings are derived from the real world this is just the starting point. It is an entry or structure that is recognizable and familiar for the viewer and myself and therefore gives the painting a beginning that is tangible. This then allows the intangibles or the atmosphere of the painting to exist. I am never setting out to create a real space - only ever a painted one. Maybe this is why there is never really a specific time or space (or sometimes season) in the paintings as such, even though, if one was to see the actual source, it would be 'real'' (P. Doig, quoted in G. Mackert, 'Peter Doig' in Dear Painter, paint me..., exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 2002, p. 184).
Continuing to explore themes of representation and memory in Doig's practice, White Out is a disorientating scene where visibility is so obscured by heavy snow that all points of reference are eclipsed through the diffused light of a continuous white cloud layer, a visual analogy for memory recall. Doig employs snow as a symbolic tool referring to the hazy quality often experienced when recalling visual imagery. In the process, these memories become suffused with emotive undertows, a quality which Doig conveys through his own technique of melding positive and negative space. 'The snow was always a way of almost creating a negative space or a screen to be forced to look through or a distance from the subject within' Doig explains, 'I was completely surprised at how seductive it was to paint and also to look at and how it could create genuine atmosphere even though it is in some way such an abstract device' (P. Doig, quoted in G. Mackert, 'Peter Doig' in Dear Painter, paint me..., exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 2002, p. 184). With an ability to draw upon a wealth of art historical references, Doig's snow-screen also finds precedent in Bruegel the Elder's Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, 1563. Of the old master's work Doig has noted, 'when you look at [Bruegel's painting,] the snow is almost all the same size, it's not perspectival, it's this notion of the 'idea' of snow, which I like. It becomes like a screen, making you look through it.' (P. Doig, quoted in L. Edelstein, 'Peter Doig: Losing Oneself in the Looking', in Flash Art 31, May-June 1998, p. 86).