Peter Doig
There isn't much left to say about Doig that others haven't already said. If you asked people to name the most influential living painter, many would choose Doig, and I am hard pressed to disagree. I find it heartening that, over my lifetime, we have moved from what I consider the highly complex yet ultimately limiting constraints of the New York art world to the disparate, rudderless miasma of paths thousands of artists are now exploring, built on the foundation laid by previous generations.
I don't think people who weren't immersed in the art world of the 1980s will ever fully understand the oppressive weight of the Duchamp, Greenberg, and Pollock legacies. In my view, generations of artists grappled with the rise of conceptualism and its relationship to painting. As we emerged from that era, Doig became a leading light in this new phase of expanding what a painting can be.
I have only seen a couple of his works in person. You can see that this is a guy who is attacking his work the same way that you see de Kooning figuring out what it is he is trying to do. The mark making and execution of the work are evident and act as a language all of its own.
One thing I really appreciate about Doig is his interest in revisiting a composition over and over and over again. When I look at a group of works like those from ‘Echo Lake’ done around 1998-2000, you can see Doig is messing with different materials and ways of getting the materials onto the paper or canvas. Its fascinating to see. This is what art is in my mind. Art is exploration and discovery. The amount of exploration and discovery going on in these works is evident and overwhelming.
More coming.
