Peter Doig returns to his birthplace of Edinburgh with a new exhibition – No Foreign Lands – at the National Gallery of Scotland, in the RSA building on the mound. The exhibition focuses on his recent work, made since he moved with his family to Trinidad. Some of the work is so recent you can smell the lavender oil he uses to thin his paints.
Artnews and the Guardian have a range of his images online for viewing.
Doig works on series of paintings, reworking his subjects several times to expore the images. Pelican shows a scene with a man dragging one of the birds away for food. Red boat contains several imaginary boys. Studio Film Club – a painted film still of that weeks show. Girl in a tree – of his daughter. Figure by a pool in the halucinatory colours of the tropics.
“A photo is like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want… I’m not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.”
“I am always interested in what we miss when we try to focus on what we see. For example, when you take a photo you will always feel a bit disappointed after the exposure, because it’s never representing what you perceived when you took it.”
Read the reviews:
Guardian interview.
Guardian article.
Telegraph article.
Financial Times article.