Peter Doig (Scottish, b.1959) is a painter renowned for his
landscapes, inspired by his own itinerant lifestyle, and by the physical progressions of modern society. Born in Edinburgh, Doig lived in Trinidad, London, and Canada in his youth. While studying painting at Central Saint Martins and at the Chelsea School of Art in London, he developed his unique approach; in works evoking the tradition of romantic landscape painting, Doig drew attention to the act of applying paint to the canvas by combining abstracted elements with ordinary subject matter.
Doig paints from photographic sources such as his own pictures of landscapes, film stills, and images from newspapers and magazines; he does not seek to replicate these images in his paintings. Instead, he uses them as a tool to create works that draw from both individual and collective memories of place. In 1994, Doig was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, launching him to fame in the international art community. His works, which depict scenes ranging from
urban,
rural, and
wooded landscapes to
artists’ studios and
lone figures in fishing boats, concentrate on the illusionistic properties of paint. In his most recent works featuring
scenes of Trinidad, Doig revisits one of his childhood homes; the artist now has a studio in Trinidad and also teaches painting at the School of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany.