While wandering in the city, I saw a poster of retrospective of a certain painter Peter Doig. The image was a melancholic young man or woman, sitting on a canoe, facing the viewer nonchalantly. Water below was dark and threatening. The atmosphere was tense. Immediately I was taken and rushed to Paris Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition, which completely blew me away with the scope, variety and intensive of his work.
According to Wikipedia,
Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, and in 1962 moved with his family to Trinidad, where his father worked with a shipping and trading company, and then in 1966 to Canada. He went to London in 1979 to study fine art at the Wimbledon School of Art, St Martin's School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, where he received an MA. In the mid-1980s he lived and worked in Montreal.
In 1993 Doig won the first prize at the John Moores exhibition with his painting Blotter. This brought public recognition, cemented in 1994, when he was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 1999 he selected EASTinternational with Roy Arden. From 1995 to 2000 he was a trustee of the Tate Gallery.
In 2002, Doig moved back to Trinidad, where he set up a studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts centre near Port of Spain, and also became professor at the fine arts academy in Düsseldorf, Germany.
In 2008, a major retrospective of his work (entitled "Peter Doig") was held at Tate Britain (February-May) and the Paris Museum of Modern Art (June-September) and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (October 8-January , 2009).
Boat motif played a significant role in Doig's paintings. Lonely landscape claimed another big legacy of his work. But his works cover much broader ground, due to his wandering on the earth, perhaps. Most overwhelming elements of his paintings and drawings are the muted sadness and melancholy. It lingered with me for a long time.
His bio and works can be viewed at Saatchi Gallery online:
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