Lot Essay
Ajoyful apparition from a pivotal moment in Peter Doig’s early practice, Ski Jacket captures the slippages between memory, event, and dream. Arboreal forms in forest green delineate a ski run crowded with brightly colored figures in miniature. A series of buildings stands within an assembly of trees and people move about and gather. Horizontal brushwork captures the snowy landscape, and Doig has applied his paint in thin, almost vaporous washes, lending the entire composition a hazy, impressionistic effect. Suffused with small vignettes, Ski Jacket is animated to the point of happy mayhem, a prismatic rendering of grace and ungainliness. Indeed, the painting, explained Doig, concerned the “fumbling and awkwardness” of learning to ski, “how when you start skiing you slip all over the place, yet over a period of time you learn to cope and eventually manage” (P. Doig, quoted in K. Scott, Peter Doig, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2001, p. 20). Ski Jacket was painted one year prior to Doig’s homonymously titled painting held in the collection of Tate London.
Doig’s practice is deeply informed by his own experience of geographic dislocation. Born in Scotland, he moved with his family to Trinidad at the age of two, before settling in Canada five years later. At nineteen, he enrolled in art school in London where he remained for over a decade save for a brief spell in Montreal in the mid-1980s. The canvases created during the early 1990s, including Ski Jacket, contend with the feeling of being caught between worlds, of looking through time, and Doig drew on the Canadian landscapes of his youth as a means of expressing these sensations.
"They’re worlds within worlds within worlds".
Peter Doig
Indeed, a Doig painting usually begins with an idea, though months or years can pass before the right visual alchemy—a combination of photographic, art historical, and personal references—brings it into being. The initial inspiration for Ski Jacket came from a photograph the artist’s father had found in a Canadian newspaper. Headlined “Exorbitant Prices and Excessive Crowds Make the Leisure Stressful for Many Japanese Workers”, the image captured the chaos of a popular tourist spot in Japan. The vertiginous activity along the ski slope reminded Doig of the scroll-like form of Japanese landscape painting, though under his hand, all signs of the image’s origins have been obscured. Instead, Doig refracted the scene through his own memories of a snow-covered world.
Snow, which blankets and conceals, became a conceptual strategy Doig employed to encourage disorientation, and he painted several snowy scenes during this period, including Pink Snow, 1991, held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was inspired, in part, by Claude Monet’s wintery landscapes, particularly the colors of those he painted at the end of his life, which Doig saw exhibited. The brushwork of Ski Jacket, as in Doig’s other paintings from this period, does resemble that of the French painter. Both used loose, open brushwork to build feeling into their painted worlds. And like his predecessor, Doig too is acutely sensitive to how atmosphere effects alter perception. “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,” Doig has explained. “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 A. Searle, K. Scott and C. Grenier, eds., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132).
Snow could, Doig found, inspire retrospection and reverie, but it is just as likely to conjure memories of school cancellations, the thrill of a speeding sled, an all-out snowball fight. Everything, be it nostalgia or action, is heightened in the snow, a sense evident in Ski Jacket. Indeed, part of the majesty of a Doig painting is the manner in which it arrests feeling. “I think that painting has to have resonance,” notes Doig. “It has to have a life beyond what it’s depicting. Without that, it may be just a drawing, or illustration” (P. Doig, quoted in B. Techo and M. Matsui, “I Am Never Bored with Painting: Peter Doig, Interview”, June 2020, online). Doig’s canvases exude poignancy and nostalgia, but also joy; they capture worlds within worlds, and the way that all interpretation is layered within cocoons of experience.
Doig’s practice is deeply informed by his own experience of geographic dislocation. Born in Scotland, he moved with his family to Trinidad at the age of two, before settling in Canada five years later. At nineteen, he enrolled in art school in London where he remained for over a decade save for a brief spell in Montreal in the mid-1980s. The canvases created during the early 1990s, including Ski Jacket, contend with the feeling of being caught between worlds, of looking through time, and Doig drew on the Canadian landscapes of his youth as a means of expressing these sensations.
"They’re worlds within worlds within worlds".
Peter Doig
Indeed, a Doig painting usually begins with an idea, though months or years can pass before the right visual alchemy—a combination of photographic, art historical, and personal references—brings it into being. The initial inspiration for Ski Jacket came from a photograph the artist’s father had found in a Canadian newspaper. Headlined “Exorbitant Prices and Excessive Crowds Make the Leisure Stressful for Many Japanese Workers”, the image captured the chaos of a popular tourist spot in Japan. The vertiginous activity along the ski slope reminded Doig of the scroll-like form of Japanese landscape painting, though under his hand, all signs of the image’s origins have been obscured. Instead, Doig refracted the scene through his own memories of a snow-covered world.
Snow, which blankets and conceals, became a conceptual strategy Doig employed to encourage disorientation, and he painted several snowy scenes during this period, including Pink Snow, 1991, held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was inspired, in part, by Claude Monet’s wintery landscapes, particularly the colors of those he painted at the end of his life, which Doig saw exhibited. The brushwork of Ski Jacket, as in Doig’s other paintings from this period, does resemble that of the French painter. Both used loose, open brushwork to build feeling into their painted worlds. And like his predecessor, Doig too is acutely sensitive to how atmosphere effects alter perception. “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,” Doig has explained. “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 A. Searle, K. Scott and C. Grenier, eds., Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132).
Snow could, Doig found, inspire retrospection and reverie, but it is just as likely to conjure memories of school cancellations, the thrill of a speeding sled, an all-out snowball fight. Everything, be it nostalgia or action, is heightened in the snow, a sense evident in Ski Jacket. Indeed, part of the majesty of a Doig painting is the manner in which it arrests feeling. “I think that painting has to have resonance,” notes Doig. “It has to have a life beyond what it’s depicting. Without that, it may be just a drawing, or illustration” (P. Doig, quoted in B. Techo and M. Matsui, “I Am Never Bored with Painting: Peter Doig, Interview”, June 2020, online). Doig’s canvases exude poignancy and nostalgia, but also joy; they capture worlds within worlds, and the way that all interpretation is layered within cocoons of experience.