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Lot Essay
'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).
Pinto, 2000, a crisp wintery scene suffused with the soft glow of twilight sun, depicts in all its chromatic wonderment a romantic vision of the frozen north - an Eggleston topographical landscape captured in Doig's nostalgia-tinged lens of Canada. Taking its title from the lone brown and white horse grazing in the foreground, the Pinto's dappled coat echoes the sparse snow covered ground. Pinto was included in the artist's solo exhibition, Peter Doig at Tate Britain, London, in 2008, and later travelled to Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. A watercolour iteration of Pinto, 2001, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
Utilising the full liquid properties of the paint, Doig applied oil paint directly onto linen to create the texture of austere, frozen tundra; an unusual technique in his practice. Obfuscated in an atmospheric haze, the horse's profile melts into the wild landscape. Cool midwinter light of soft greys, violets, mint greens and ambers softly radiates from the painting's surface, eliciting within the viewer feelings of both comfort and solitude. Indeed the interplay of dawn-like colours with dusky purple shadows saturates our vision, and in blurring the edges of distinction, creates a sort of visionary waking dream. Glowing with unnatural luminosity, the streaking, spotting, opaque and contrasting hues and textures combine to evoke an emotive quality that refutes any reference to a specific moment in reality. Softly translucent and bespeckled, 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 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. As the artist has described, '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).
Continuing to explore themes of representation and memory in Doig's practice, the dreamlike palette and soft focus of Pinto performs as a visual analogy for memory recall, 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 foreground and background, Doig's image is both familiar and estranged as it oscillates between figuration and abstraction. 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 recognisable 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).
(P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132).
Pinto, 2000, a crisp wintery scene suffused with the soft glow of twilight sun, depicts in all its chromatic wonderment a romantic vision of the frozen north - an Eggleston topographical landscape captured in Doig's nostalgia-tinged lens of Canada. Taking its title from the lone brown and white horse grazing in the foreground, the Pinto's dappled coat echoes the sparse snow covered ground. Pinto was included in the artist's solo exhibition, Peter Doig at Tate Britain, London, in 2008, and later travelled to Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. A watercolour iteration of Pinto, 2001, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
Utilising the full liquid properties of the paint, Doig applied oil paint directly onto linen to create the texture of austere, frozen tundra; an unusual technique in his practice. Obfuscated in an atmospheric haze, the horse's profile melts into the wild landscape. Cool midwinter light of soft greys, violets, mint greens and ambers softly radiates from the painting's surface, eliciting within the viewer feelings of both comfort and solitude. Indeed the interplay of dawn-like colours with dusky purple shadows saturates our vision, and in blurring the edges of distinction, creates a sort of visionary waking dream. Glowing with unnatural luminosity, the streaking, spotting, opaque and contrasting hues and textures combine to evoke an emotive quality that refutes any reference to a specific moment in reality. Softly translucent and bespeckled, 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 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. As the artist has described, '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).
Continuing to explore themes of representation and memory in Doig's practice, the dreamlike palette and soft focus of Pinto performs as a visual analogy for memory recall, 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 foreground and background, Doig's image is both familiar and estranged as it oscillates between figuration and abstraction. 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 recognisable 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).