(Note: This is research for my final critical writing for my MA and much of what is written here will be referenced to my own practice.)
In his Lecture from 2014 at the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts, Hartley talks about Doig's use of visual language, the way he works are
thought processes made visual, these being deduced in a non-linguistic way.
This in turn he relates to what Rudolf Arnheim called Visual Thinking. The Gestalt
philosophers of the time stated that acts of visual seeing are not purely mechanical
or an act of receiving data. They argued that intelligence and memory are part
of perceiving the world about us. This helps use recognise the patterns and
objects that constitute the appearance of reality creating an Intelligence of
the eye. Visual artists have the ability to develop these skills and give
enhance meaning to the realities they depict or create. Doig's visual stimuli
were complex and his ability to interpret them visually advanced.
Doig was first at College in 1979 at the Wimbledon School
of Art when some of the materialistic elements of Neo-Expressionist painting were bold and questioning of the established
image of painting and artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat
were prominent. This rich use of colour, partly inspired by graffiti art and
the loosening of the formalistic nature of histories predeceasing paintings.
He was at St Martin's School of art
from 1980 to 1983. This was a continuing of the time when painting was being
rediscovered. In 1981 the highly influential exhibition 'The New Spirit of
Painting' (15 January 1981 – 18 March 1981) took place
at the Royal Academy in London. It questioned the role of painting, it's academic
necessity and The New York school of Abstract painting as the only source of
direction within the painting arena. It championed the London School of Bacon,
Freud, Auerbach and Kitaj and independent spirits such as Guston. For any college student at the time this challenging
of convention would have been highlighted. Through the works of these noted
London based artists Doig would have seen more of an acceptance of the
metaphorical interpretations of experience through visual dialogues, a
discourse that moved away from traditional modus operandi, potentially freeing
up his options.
 |
| Gerhard_richter Öl auf Photographie ; 1989 ; 10 x 15 cm |
Also during this period of development Nicholas
Serota, who was at White Chapel Gallery, was showing works by Gerhard Richter
and David Bomberg in 1979, Max Beckmann in 1980 and Brice Martin in 1981, Anselm
Kiefer and Philip Guston in 1982 and Malcolm Morley in 1983. Doig acknowledges
the influence of such artists on his work but says that he tended to look
towards American painters. Yet the process demonstrated by artists such as Gerhard
Richter, who used photography heavily in his work, can be cited here as giving
acceptance to using such devices to generate imagery for paintings.
Another exhibition that had an impact
on Doig was the Who Chicago? in Camden Arts Centre in 1981 which contained paintings
by Ed Paschke, Roger Brown and Jim Nutt. Malcolm Morley was also very influential
especially seeing he was inspired by the New York based Graffiti artists who,
as mentioned, were question the role of painting at the time.
Having spent some time in Canada Doig
returned to London to do a Masters Degree at Chelsea School of Art in 1989. By
this stage the debate about painting had moved on and a Neo-Conceptual environment
was emerging with its visceral approach and the YBA's show Frieze in 1988 had
broken new ground. Painting was far removed from the critical agenda and Doig
himself has said in an interview in 2006 with Karen Wright that "the
powers that be were almost embarrassed by painting in those days." But
Doig was already embroiled in his own painterly journey that had its roots in
his previous two periods at college in England and he would not steer from this
path despite the hostile pressure at the time.
Partly because of this pressure and his
rich source material of lands and processes: Canada, England and Trinidad with
photo and film influences, new technologies and an interest in print, Doig
justified his work and claimed it was conceptual yet rooted in a tradition of
painting. His images were a formation of process, he had assimilated naturally
and through practicing in the diverse source material of the time, where he
created an imaginary place. Doig was expressing his thought as a complex visual
language, as ideas or concepts. For example he uses notions of advertising or
film as leads for elements of his framing, the language of mass media or an
establishing shot from a movie, stitched into an exotic landscape, combined
with the colours of the neo-expressionism and the broken surface of a blurred video
still. These are the visual collections of Doig that he has gathered through
his own experiences.
 |
| Peter Doig, Concrete Cabin II (1992) |
One visual tool that Doig uses in his
work is the foreground screen. This is a device that Film makers use to make
the viewer feel present and closer to the action, as if this area is approachable
and is a deliberate tool to draw the viewer in. This instinctive use of the
foreground in such a way will have been a motif recognised and reinforced by
Doig through mainstream cinema. In the Concrete Cabin painting series of 1989
we look through a thicket of trees to the cabin as if the tense beginning to a suspenseful
film, the building a location of something unsavoury.
Gerard Richter and Edvard Polker who
were widely shown in London during Doig's formative College years painted over
images derived from photographs or prints. They worked up the surface of these
images manipulating the paint to generate a range of effects. These use of
photography became an accepted part of the artists cannon during this period.
Doig's resolution to hold his course,
within a turbulent period of conceptual expression, demonstrates that his visualised
internal thought processes and collection of motifs and stimuli were very much
a representation of his own personal visual world.
Biblography
ARNHEIM, R. Visual
Thinking (1969) USA: University of California Press
HARTLEY, K. Peter
Doig: Visual Intelligence Lecture January 23, 2014. America, Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UGHsMtQStA
Who Chicago? : an Exhibition of Contemporary Imagists : Camden Arts
Centre, London, 10 Dec.-25 Jan.; Ceolfrith Gallery, Sunderland Arts Centre, 16
Feb.-14 Mar. 1981; Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 21 Mar.-30 Apr
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