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Lot Essay
A web of dark tree-trunks shimmers in the surface of a frozen pool. A figure’s silhouette is reflected among the trees: he stands at the water’s edge, his feet visible at the top of the picture. Patches of fallen snow interrupt the mirror image, and a haze of golden droplets overlays the canvas like a veil. Peter Doig’s Reflection (1997) is closely related to his 1993 masterpiece Blotter (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), which won him the John Moores Painting Prize that year, and exemplifies the beguiling, wintry paintings with which the artist made his name during the 1990s. Sparked by recollections of his youth in Canada, its hallucinogenic layers evoke the mysterious, shifting textures of memory itself.
Born in Scotland in 1959, Doig spent some of his childhood in Trinidad before moving to Canada. He came to London aged twenty to study art at Wimbledon and then Saint Martin’s, returning—after a stint working in the oilfields of Alberta—to complete his MA at the Chelsea School of Art, where he graduated in 1990. The following years saw him rise rapidly to fame, with a breakout show at the Whitechapel Gallery (1991), his receipt of the John Moores Painting Prize (1993) and a Turner Prize nomination (1994). Living in London, he embarked on something of a ‘Canadian period’ as he sought to come to terms with the country’s formative role in his life. Distance and dislocation have always been important for Doig, who never works from direct observation. His practice is fuelled by second-hand images—found photographs, or his own—that speak to both personal and universal experiences of being in the world.
The motif for Reflection emerged in 1993. Inspired by Canadian artists including Tom Thomson, Paterson Ewen and David Milne, Doig was experimenting with material ways to capture the effects of weather in paint. He completed the landmark work Pond Life that year, depicting three figures on a frozen pond, filigreed with ice-skate tracks and spattered with an impasto of falling snow. When he added the figures’ reflections, he found that ‘the mirroring opened up another world. It went from being something like a recognisable reality to something more magical’ (quoted in P. Bonaventura, ‘Peter Doig: A Partial Record’, Parkett, no. 67, 2003, p. 57). Seeking to explore this doubleness and inversion further, he photographed his younger brother standing on a frozen pond—which they flooded to create a clearer reflection—on a visit to Canada that Christmas. The resulting image would give rise to a suite of major paintings including Blotter, Window Pane (1993), Reflection (What does your soul look like) (1996) and the present work, as well as a number of etchings and works on paper.
The titles of Blotter and Window Pane—both referring to formats of LSD—highlighted their psychedelic quality. Doig remembered a powerful acid trip he experienced as a teenager, soon after his family had moved from rural Quebec to Toronto: ‘… I put my foot on the floor and it felt like the road was almost sticky, and as I lifted up my foot it was spreading out, all the cracks in the road were spreading.’ As well as invoking this altered sensory state, Blotter was also, he explained, about ‘loneliness or on your ownness and trying to understand what it means to be inside your own head’ (in conversation with U. Küster, in Peter Doig, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2014, pp. 19-20). Doig conjures this same vertiginous interiority in Reflection. The external world becomes unstable—is even turned upside-down—in the surface of the pond. The figure merges with the trees, and the layers of snow act as a screen, dramatising the sensation of looking through, or finding focus, as one tries to hold onto a memory or dream.
Born in Scotland in 1959, Doig spent some of his childhood in Trinidad before moving to Canada. He came to London aged twenty to study art at Wimbledon and then Saint Martin’s, returning—after a stint working in the oilfields of Alberta—to complete his MA at the Chelsea School of Art, where he graduated in 1990. The following years saw him rise rapidly to fame, with a breakout show at the Whitechapel Gallery (1991), his receipt of the John Moores Painting Prize (1993) and a Turner Prize nomination (1994). Living in London, he embarked on something of a ‘Canadian period’ as he sought to come to terms with the country’s formative role in his life. Distance and dislocation have always been important for Doig, who never works from direct observation. His practice is fuelled by second-hand images—found photographs, or his own—that speak to both personal and universal experiences of being in the world.
The motif for Reflection emerged in 1993. Inspired by Canadian artists including Tom Thomson, Paterson Ewen and David Milne, Doig was experimenting with material ways to capture the effects of weather in paint. He completed the landmark work Pond Life that year, depicting three figures on a frozen pond, filigreed with ice-skate tracks and spattered with an impasto of falling snow. When he added the figures’ reflections, he found that ‘the mirroring opened up another world. It went from being something like a recognisable reality to something more magical’ (quoted in P. Bonaventura, ‘Peter Doig: A Partial Record’, Parkett, no. 67, 2003, p. 57). Seeking to explore this doubleness and inversion further, he photographed his younger brother standing on a frozen pond—which they flooded to create a clearer reflection—on a visit to Canada that Christmas. The resulting image would give rise to a suite of major paintings including Blotter, Window Pane (1993), Reflection (What does your soul look like) (1996) and the present work, as well as a number of etchings and works on paper.
The titles of Blotter and Window Pane—both referring to formats of LSD—highlighted their psychedelic quality. Doig remembered a powerful acid trip he experienced as a teenager, soon after his family had moved from rural Quebec to Toronto: ‘… I put my foot on the floor and it felt like the road was almost sticky, and as I lifted up my foot it was spreading out, all the cracks in the road were spreading.’ As well as invoking this altered sensory state, Blotter was also, he explained, about ‘loneliness or on your ownness and trying to understand what it means to be inside your own head’ (in conversation with U. Küster, in Peter Doig, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2014, pp. 19-20). Doig conjures this same vertiginous interiority in Reflection. The external world becomes unstable—is even turned upside-down—in the surface of the pond. The figure merges with the trees, and the layers of snow act as a screen, dramatising the sensation of looking through, or finding focus, as one tries to hold onto a memory or dream.