He enrolled on a foundation course at Wimbledon College, where he met Bonnie Kennedy, who was to become his wife.
The following year he enrolled at St Martin's, but he was held back by his lack of skill as a draughtsman.
He returned to London at the age of 31 to enroll on an Master of Arts course at Chelsea School of Art where he found an industry going through a huge change as the Young British Artists stormed onto the scene.
He enrolled on a foundation course at Wimbledon College, where he met Bonnie Kennedy, who was to become his wife.
The following year he enrolled at St Martin's, but he was held back by his lack of skill as a draughtsman.
He returned to London at the age of 31 to enroll on an Master of Arts course at Chelsea School of Art where he found an industry going through a huge change as the Young British Artists stormed onto the scene.
Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, to Mary and David Doig. At the age of two, his family moved to Trinidad where his siblings Andrew and Sophie were born. When he was seven, the family moved to Montreal, Canada, due to his father's job as a shipping merchant. His transitory childhood robbed him of a sense of belonging, which lasted throughout adulthood. He never lived in a house for more than three months at a time.
Peter was sent to a Scottish boarding school from the age of 12 thanks to money left by a great-aunt, but after three years of unhappiness, his parents let him come home. His mother had been worried he'd be expelled. The family moved to Toronto where Doig struggled at school.
Peter enrolled on a foundation course at Wimbledon College, where he met Bonnie Kennedy, who was to become his wife. The following year he enrolled at St Martin's, but he was held back by his lack of skill as a draughtsman. He recounted how one of his teachers held up a life drawing of Doig's, declaring it the worst he had ever seen. He learned to get round it through taking photographs, and projecting them onto canvas to paint on top.
Peter returned to London at the age of 31 to enroll on an Master of Arts course at Chelsea School of Art where he found an industry going through a huge change as the Young British Artists stormed onto the scene. It was here that he met lifelong friend Chris Ofili, who would go on to become the first black winner of the prestigious Turner Prize. They bonded through their love of painting, Trinidad, and music, and have been close friends ever since.
By the age of 17 Doig had dropped out of school to take up various jobs. It was not until he found himself lonely and bored working as a laborer on a gas drilling rig that Doig picked up a sketchbook for the first time. He had no real 'natural' drawing skill, but his father had been an amateur artist and his great-aunt a professional, so he decided on painting as a career, despite he was poor at drawing. In 1979, he took himself off to London to go to art school.
Peter lived in King's Cross, which he described at the time as "a mad, rough place, full of oddballs and artists". Doig felt comfortable in the local scene and started hanging around with musicians and fashion designers. At college, he said, he "found his voice", despite being intimidated by his peers and the "general air of cool that hung over the place." He began his artistic career painting urban scenes, which he said were "less about making paintings and more about making images."
After Peter graduated, he moved back to Montreal where his wife, Bonnie Kennedy, had been offered a job at the fashion firm Le Château. They got married in 1987, and Doig worked designing film sets, but felt cut off from the community in London. It was around this time that Doig realized he was doing something quite different from his peers. With the exception of Ofili and Jenny Saville, most of his contemporaries thought that painting was obsolete.
His work remained unpopular for a few years but in 1990 his career began to turn around when he won the Whitechapel Artist Prize and three years later the John Moores Painting Prize. Doig was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994. In 2002 the Doig family - now comprising two more daughters, Eva and Alice - settled in Trinidad, inviting comparisons to painter Paul Gauguin, who moved from France to Tahiti. They had their son, August, there, and three years later Ofili moved to the island to join them.
By 2007 Doig had become Europe's most valuable living painter when his painting “White Canoe” (1990 - 1991) sold at auction for a record-breaking $7.5 million. He held this record until Lucien Freud's “Big Sue” was sold to the London-based Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich, for $33.6 million the year before Freud's death in 2011. Although the $7.5 million sale catapulted Doig into celebrity status, the sale troubled him. It was, Doig believed, a symptom of an art market gone mad.
Doig has dealt with personal difficulties in the past decade. In 2012 his 24-year marriage to Bonnie Kennedy ended. His father - to whom he was very close - died, and Doig was taken to court over a painting that had been falsely attributed to him - a complicated and protracted lawsuit that kept him out of the studio for months at a time. He had to prove in court that he was not the artist behind a bizarre desert landscape signed "1976 Pete Doige." The case took four years to conclude, and his whole family became involved before it was found that Doig had nothing to do with the work.
Peter now lives in Trinidad where he leads a simple, healthy life. He spends his time working alone in the studio and to relax he kayaks, swims, plays ice hockey, and skis. He has set up a film club, along with Ofili, which meets in a large room next to his studio every Thursday night where he and friends drink beer, watch arthouse movies and talk about what they have seen.
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. From 1995 to 2000, he was a trustee of the Tate Gallery. In 2007, his painting “White Canoe” sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist. He was honored with amfAR’s Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS in 2009. In February 2013, his painting, “The Architect's Home in the Ravine”, sold for $12 million at a London auction. He was also named the 2017 Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon.
White Canoe
Window Pane
Blotter
Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre
Pink Snow
Cobourg 3+1 more
Red House
Hitchhiker
Briey (Concrete Cabin)
Baked
Art School
Architect's Home in the Ravine
GRASSHOPPER
The Heart of Old San Juan
White Creep
Ski Jacket
Jetty
Camp Forestia
100 Years Ago
The House that Jack Built
Almost Grown
Swamped
Concrete Cabin
Mountain View
Milky Way
Red Boat (Imaginary Boys)
Lapeyrouse Wall
Night Playground
Music of the Future
Lunker
Echo Lake
Camp Forestia
Okahumkee (Some other Peoples Blues)
Saint Anton (Flat Light)
Grasshopper
Young Bean Farmer
Night Fishing
Bird House (small)
Bomb Island
Pine House (Rooms for Rent)
Jetty
Orange
Defiant in the face of conceptualist, multimedia, deskilling practices, Doig's paintings use specific, autobiographical moments to connect with universal emotions in a mystical and intangible way. Doig's paintings almost always contain human figures, although they are often partly obscured, hidden, or dwarfed by their environment. He rejects the split between figurative and abstract painting, however, and uses recognizable tropes of abstract painting - such as the dot or splatter - in the service of representation or suggestion - as in his snowscapes.
Doig uses color chaotically and extremely effectively. His palettes can be subdued, cool, warm, or bright, but he is unparalleled in his understanding of how to (un)balance a composition via color. Complementary colors, sickly greens, sentimental pastels, and uncompromising reds all feature heavily, demonstrating a boldness with color that is unique in his generation.
Magical Realism refers to a genre of literature and art in which everyday situations are interrupted, or mixed with, supernatural, spiritual, or other unlikely and uncanny events, environments, and characters. Doig has developed a magical realist painting style, which has some resonances with Surrealism, however is particular in its suggestion of narrative, character, and conflicting worlds. Doig combines imagery from multiple sources - film, art, and literary references as well as his own memories - to create these part realist, part magical scenes in his paintings.
Quotations:
"In many ways, it's about getting a living thing from the studio to the gallery, something that has an energy. I think that's what we find exciting about looking at other people's paintings, something that's living - not inert or complete or perfect. That's what I like, anyway."
"I'm an outsider. I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner."
"I was out on a limb. My work looked very different to everything else on show and, not just that, but some of the artists did not want to show their work in the same space as me. They obviously thought my paintings were some sort of dreadful throwback or somehow not serious enough or absolute kitsch."
"I was absolutely shocked that someone would pay so much but I was also struck by the pressure it put me under. To go into a studio and think you're going to make a painting that's going to make a million dollars or a hundred thousand."
He was not an academic child and preferred to spend time with friends, listening to music, smoking weed or taking LSD. Speaking quietly, Doig appears at once shy and commanding, expressing himself through flurries of words and ideas, exuding a sense of inner sureness about the value of what he does. In a number of interviews he has come across as a romantic who is open to sharing his sadness and longing for a different, foreign world.
Quotes from others about the person
Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity.
After Doig graduated, he moved back to Montreal where his future wife, Bonnie Kennedy, had been offered a job at the fashion firm Le Château. They got married in 1987. In 1992 the couple's first child, Celeste, was born, then Simone was born two years later. In 2002 the Doig family - then comprising two more daughters, Eva and Alice - settled in Trinidad. In 2012 his 24-year marriage to Bonnie Kennedy ended. In 2015 he had another daughter, Echo, with curator Parinaz Mogadassi.
