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Lot Essay
Dreamlike and alluring, Peter Doig’s Driftwood (Study) is an intimate vignette of two figures on a brilliant green seashore. Rendered in soft, translucent drips and washes of oil, the work has been held in the same private collection since it was made. The couple hover, strangely displaced within the picture, as though glimpsed through a hazy mirage. Unaware of a distant, watchful gaze, they are absorbed in a world of their own. The work is based on a selection of photographs taken by the artist of Yara Beach, Trinidad during his residency with friend and fellow British painter Chris Ofili in 2000, and forms a study for the remarkable canvas Driftwood that is now held in the Carnegie Museum of Art collection. Painting the composition time and time again between 2001 and 2002 in several studies and addenda, Doig returned to image as one might return to a dream or memory, in an attempt to bridge its distance, trace its shapes and outlines. Suffused with a distinctly evocative air, the work itself drifts strangely between the real, remembered, and imagined. Another work by Doig, Wall Eyed Pinto (2003) comes from the same collection, and is lot 118 in the present sale.
Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Doig moved with his family to the Southern Caribbean island of Trinidad in 1962, before relocating to Canada. He moved to London in the late 1970s, and again in the late 1980s to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art and at the Chelsea School of Art respectively. Deeply influenced by the assorted memories of his itinerant upbringing, Doig is celebrated for his nostalgic conjuring of place. Known for landscapes that feel loose, fractured, and faraway, the artist masterfully evokes a curious sensation of ‘elsewhere’ (S. Aquin, quoted in ‘Peter Doig: the art of the foreign’, The Guardian, 27 July 2013). Separated from the viewer by a long, horizontal beam of driftwood, the present work’s couple are suspended in an ambiguous middle ground. Neither near nor far, they seem to have been washed ashore like a free-floating memory. Returning to his tropical childhood home at the age of forty-one for his artist’s residency in 2000, Doig was surprised by his vivid sensory recollections: ‘I remembered the architecture. I could remember smells … It’s a potent place visually, just the experience of it, even at a young age, and I realised I had always felt very fond of this place’ (P. Doig, quoted in Peter Doig No Foreign Lands, exh. cat. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh 2013, p. 158).
Often working from photographs and found image sources—film stills, magazines, newspapers, postcards—Doig reveals a curiosity for visual subjects that are experienced at one remove. Lyle Rexer describes how ‘something grabs him in particular images … they nag at us with their lostness, like old snapshots found stuck in a software manual. We can almost feel him turning them over in his mind’ (L. Rexer, ‘Taking the most extreme liberties to fashion an alternative world’, Tate Etc., 1 January 2008, online). Here, working from his own black and white photographs of an anonymous couple at Yara Beach, a small bay on Trinidad’s northern coastline, Doig brings together two pictorial modes. With its origin in this moment of real-world observation, Driftwood (Study) falls somewhere between the actual and make-believe, the defined and amorphous. Indeed, painted at the very beginning of what would become two decades spent in Trinidad, the work is steeped in personal significance as Doig conjures both past and future realities upon its surface.
Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Doig moved with his family to the Southern Caribbean island of Trinidad in 1962, before relocating to Canada. He moved to London in the late 1970s, and again in the late 1980s to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art and at the Chelsea School of Art respectively. Deeply influenced by the assorted memories of his itinerant upbringing, Doig is celebrated for his nostalgic conjuring of place. Known for landscapes that feel loose, fractured, and faraway, the artist masterfully evokes a curious sensation of ‘elsewhere’ (S. Aquin, quoted in ‘Peter Doig: the art of the foreign’, The Guardian, 27 July 2013). Separated from the viewer by a long, horizontal beam of driftwood, the present work’s couple are suspended in an ambiguous middle ground. Neither near nor far, they seem to have been washed ashore like a free-floating memory. Returning to his tropical childhood home at the age of forty-one for his artist’s residency in 2000, Doig was surprised by his vivid sensory recollections: ‘I remembered the architecture. I could remember smells … It’s a potent place visually, just the experience of it, even at a young age, and I realised I had always felt very fond of this place’ (P. Doig, quoted in Peter Doig No Foreign Lands, exh. cat. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh 2013, p. 158).
Often working from photographs and found image sources—film stills, magazines, newspapers, postcards—Doig reveals a curiosity for visual subjects that are experienced at one remove. Lyle Rexer describes how ‘something grabs him in particular images … they nag at us with their lostness, like old snapshots found stuck in a software manual. We can almost feel him turning them over in his mind’ (L. Rexer, ‘Taking the most extreme liberties to fashion an alternative world’, Tate Etc., 1 January 2008, online). Here, working from his own black and white photographs of an anonymous couple at Yara Beach, a small bay on Trinidad’s northern coastline, Doig brings together two pictorial modes. With its origin in this moment of real-world observation, Driftwood (Study) falls somewhere between the actual and make-believe, the defined and amorphous. Indeed, painted at the very beginning of what would become two decades spent in Trinidad, the work is steeped in personal significance as Doig conjures both past and future realities upon its surface.