Peter Doig's Painting 'Ski Jacket' 1994

Detail from Ski Jacket by Peter Doig

I recently went up to the Tate Modern where I saw Peter Doig's painting entitled the Ski Jacket.

Title: Ski Jacket - Date: 1994 Medium: Oil paint on 2 canvases

Dimensions Support, right: 2953 x 1604 x 33 mm support, left: 2950 x 1900 x 33 mm

On display at Tate Modern - Theme: Level 4: Media Networks - Room: Painting and Mass Media (Room 12)

 

Looking at the mark making I was inspired by the range of marks but also interested by the fact that this image was not as thickly painted as I previously thought. There were blobs of thick paint here and there deliberately placed as if sculptural features and the main body of the paint was a complex mix of brush strokes where the detail was secondary. This painting is massive and meant to be view from a distance where the detail blurs.

 

There is obviously a lot of white in this painting being based on a photograph of a ski slope.  Seen here in the detail are the out of focus public on the ski slope. Working this from a photograph probably meant that Doig actually had no detail to work from and was working with a gestural process where as shape would indicate a body position.This is an interesting concept that we was in fact painting something where the detail was absent.

 

The layers of paint are obviously worked and reworked and the colours often subtitle. It's this level of reworking though that comes through and creates a massive swirling vortex of shape and colour.

The Foreground as a Tool

Something I have been considering in my paintings is the foreground. In this image you can see I have added a foreground level to the earlier landscape. The motivation for this has been a number of factors:

1) The experience is important to my work. I want the viewer to feel they are in the space even if the detail isn't photographic and the colours have been effected by the process of working from ink jet printed photographs. The use of the foreground element makes it seem as if they are lower behind the plants and isn't an angle you would normal see unless you actually got down in the field and saw that perspective.

2) Following on from this it's this angle that is so different from the normal framing of a landscape photograph. You would not ordinarily have a focus on the foreground because it's what's out beyond that would normally be the focus for the image. This framing is important to the feeling of presence.

3) The use of foreground is also a cinematic tool, and is important because the source material for the image is a still from a film I shot in the English country. Using the foreground can be a tool to draw attention to this level or when referring to the background be used "to point out a significant relationship between the two subjects." (https://collegefilmandmediastudies.com/cinematography/). This foreground is something we recoginse through the medium of film and points out connections between painting and film that I hope to develop in my practice.

This opens out important relationships in my work between the history of landscape painting and the cinematography that will help guide my visual language.

Atmosphere in my Paintings

Peter Doig in his interview with Martin Gayford (2015) talks about his painting once he'd moved to the West Indies;
 
"My paintings started changing, they started becoming influenced by my being there."
 
He comments about a recent painting of the interior of his studio in Trinidad and says;
 
"There is nothing tropical about the painting, but something about it is Trinidadian."
 
This is clearly a reference to the atmosphere that he conjures up in his paintings. I'm interested in how the atmosphere is created in my paintings by me actually being in the field before the final still is decided upon. This is a split second I take from the video footage to paint, and as I paint I very much want to feel that moment again, the essence of the place. I ideally, very much like Doig does with his paintings, want to place the viewer in a voyeuristic position where they themselves  experience the atmosphere of the moment.
 
I don't think that this can necessarily be achieved by working from a photograph, one that has been posed rather than a moment from a film. There is something about grabbing a still from a film sequence that makes it transitional. There is a split second where the image is going to change

Current painting I've just finished - March 2016

and often the clarity of the mark or the objects within the frame is diminished or blurred as if incomplete in some way or wrong.
 
The lens of the video camera therefore becomes very much like the human eye because a photographer framing his photograph has a time to consider its composition and cannot group

together a whole series of images like a film to construct the environment that it is trying to capture.
 
Also because of the location, the fields of my landscape, the pictures do appear very English and seasonal as the land changes and we experience change through the painting. This is what's Doig is talking about with his Trinidadian paintings that the changes of environment are present in what he does and the atmosphere that he experiences he then translates into paint. How much subconscious input into this must vary but there is no doubt it is there especially as time passes and weautomatically simulate the palette of the landscape.

Bibliography

GAYFORD, M. (2015) Memory Traces, Apollo Art Magazine, New York

The type of mark in my paintings?

From the stills I have put together from my field walks I am painting a none specific mark that is in a sense blurred. I am doing this largely because I am trying to generate movement in the picture as if seeing through the eyes of someone actually there. Hopefully it makes the image more engaging.

This short animated film shows this building of marks as I work on the painting.

Does this currently work how I want it to? I'm not sure if the mark is blurred enough for my liking and will experiment further in the next larger painting.

Reflecting on Mark Making in My Painting

 

The very focus of my mark making, in my paintings, has literally been blurred. The images I'm now working from are stills taken from short films that I shot on a digital video camera.  I'm working on board and I'm able to create a smooth brush stroke on the surface and I emphasising the direction of the movement in the picture as I focus on a directional grouping of marks to try and replicate a motion in the image.

The process of working from a printout of the still is also affecting how I interpret the colours and shapes of the landscape. They are removed from the true natural pallette, having been produced by the printer, and are another level through which I am translating reality.

I have purposely worked from a small A6 print and I am finding that this narrows the colours, although these have been manipulated by the printing process, into set areas. It's an abstraction of information into something simpler.

This absence of detail especially in the foreground is as if this is a quick glance at an environment, potentially as the viewer is moving through it. The interpretation seems like a second when the colours are not truly realised, a moment when the lens is adjusting.

Does this take the viewer to the spot or the moment? As yet I'm unsure. It does create action though.

Mark Making to focus on Painting inspired by Peter Doig

Concrete Cabin II (1992) Peter Doig

The question of surface, combined with the closer examination of mark making and it's processes, has opened up other possibilities for my practice. Rather than restricting myself to the ink on paper approach which is a process I had wanted to experience from the beginning, in some respects steered by my own expectations of an illustration course, I now feel I can be freer in my materials.  

This includes the use of colour and the actual process of the mark making.

I have begun a series of paintings based upon the crow theme and one of my inspirations for this move is the work of Peter Doig. His painting process uses film and an element of narrative to form colour cinematic landscapes and it is the landscape that I will be working with  as this is where the poems of Hughes, and the narratives I'm illustrating, are set. I will be examining the processes of Doig and how he gathers materials to build up his paintings.

In an interview with Richard Shiff the artist Doig says this about his process:

"I made, you can't call them films, moving moments of walking towards the building through the trees with a video camera and then I took stills from those and the stills actually were far more accurate, as to the way you actually see the building, than a still photograph taken when you're standing still. A still from a walking motion, looking and walking."

Crow's Fall I - work in progress Toby Lattimore

What Doig is saying is the actual process of filming something engages with the movement that he hopes the viewer will engage with when looking at the painting. Rather than posing a shot the still that is captured from the moving moment, that he uses to etch or paint from, is embodied by the cameraman and we see as if from that person's eyes. Perhaps this makes it more real.

These images of my painting show that I'm now engaging with a landscape, one that I walked, experienced and photographed, and the environment of the crow where his exploits are set. Ted Hughes very much wrote from within the landscape, an environment that he understood from his own experiences and one I want to express.