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Lot Essay
Like the mountain view that it depicts, Pink Mountain is a vast expanse, landscape-like in itself. Dwarfing the viewer and the snowboarder alike, the five-metre wide expanse of oil-on-canvas is an absorbing and overwhelming view. Painted in 1996, the scale of this work recalls Monet's famous Nymphéas series in the Orangerie in Paris. This is not just a painting, but an environment. Doig's deliberately Impressionistic treatment of the oils heightens the effect. This work is filled with a wondrous sense of light, the pinks and whites dazzling the viewer as though with snow-blindness.
Suspended in the air before the viewer is the snowboarder. Rendered still by the shutter of a camera or by the Pause button on a video, the implied elegant arc of the snowboarder's jump has been halted. This creates a strange atmosphere in Pink Mountain: the image of the boarder hanging there is at once miraculous, yet is rooted in the everyday footage that we see of adventurous winter sports enthusiasts on the television.
What makes the jump all the more visually engaging in Pink Mountain is the fact that the surface that the boarder has left is not visible-- it appears, by implication, to remain behind the vantage-point of the photographer, and by extension the viewer. Instead, the boarder hangs against a background that appears to be kilometres away, heightening the sense of levitation, of flight, of an impossible feat that our knowingness as a viewer renders humdrum and everyday. This is itself accentuated by the downward angle at which we view the intrepid boarder, as though we too are floating in the firmament, looking down upon a world far, far below. There is an otherworldliness in the silence of this image: the contrast between this stillness-- which is emphasised by the stillness of the mountains -- and the movement of the winter sportsman as he sails through the air creates a mysterious tension. It both adds to the peculiar ambience while also highlighting the artifice of the painting as an 'honest' image, illustrating its roots in a camera-captured image, be it from a magazine, a snapshot or from television.
Despite the work's reference to an image that could be seen any day on a sports channel, the overall effect calls to mind the sublime, of release, of flight. Yet, while this picture appears to find the miraculous in the everyday, this sense of the sublime is quickly punctured: there is something deliberately deadpan and understated about this colossal painting's contents. The scale of the picture contrasts strangely with the worthiness of its subject, and this implied imbalance is only heightened by the image's photographic origins.
The fact that this is not an oil taken from life, but instead culled from the myriad photographic sources-- both personal and salvaged, with which Doig fills his works-- throws into question the entire nature of representation and indeed of painting. The traditional role of the artist has been subverted, the role of inspiration deliberately limited and curtailed. This is a memory of a moment, but whose memory? Whose moment? Doig's works are marked by a sense of rootless nostalgia, as though the viewer is flicking through a stranger's family photographs. This is not an image from his life or from our life; instead, it is an image taken from the life of some unidentified stranger. While this can be seen to add universality to the content, it also leaves it disembodied, anonymous.
This anonymity becomes a device that forces the viewer to pay more attention to the painting itself. Regardless of content, this five metre painting controls our gaze and the distanced nature of the source image, appropriated from no-one knows where, allows us on one level to ignore it entirely and to contemplate the picture in purely formal terms. On this level, it is as a painterly adventure that we should view it. The subject matter-- the source image-- has been deliberately faded to a point where it teeters on the brink of being unrecognisable, invisible, an effect augmented by the deliberately restrained palette. Pink Mountain mimics not only the Impressionists in its surface appearance, but also the Abstract Expressionists. The areas of the picture that form trees, cliffs, snow-banks are all rendered in a manner that recalls the brushwork of the scions of Ab-Ex-- one even wonders if the presentation of as humble an object as a photograph in a blur of pinks is itself an assault on the assumed machismo of that movement. However, Pink Mountain shares the sense of objecthood that many of those artists instilled in their works, the sense of not having to refer to the outside world, but only to the experience of the painter himself:
"there is no other responsibility than the space that is confined within the painting. I have to find out how the picture works, and making the thing is the most important of all, the execution to make it into a painting. I wouldn't do it otherwise, it's the act that is to be seen-- when you paint something it becomes a fact. At the same time, it's a question of how much you let the material take over" (Doig, quoted in H. Fricke, 'Drifter: An Interview with Peter Doig', 2004, reproduced on DB Artmag at www.deutche-bank-art.com).
In this way, as the exertion of the artist, as the product of his thoughts and efforts and skills, Pink Mountain redeems itself and lays its claim to its stupendous scale, and likewise it does so as a pure celebration of the materials-- the oils-- themselves. The picture is an adventure in oils, a journey in its own right, making it all the more pertinent that the crispest element in the composition-- the snowboarder himself-- is gliding through this painterly environment in a journey that echoes and provokes the journey of our own eyes before the monumental Pink Mountain.
Visually, Pink Mountain provides a foil to many of Doig's other works. They often present the world as viewed through a mesh of either trees, branches, snow or other such visual obstacles-- implying that even within the world of the painting the material has taken over-- whereas in Pink Mountain the only obstacle is the boarder, who is arguably the subject in his own right. Rather than the confined and imprisoned view of the world that his other paintings often afford us, here we are given a towering perspective over the world. And the fact that this is a world inhabited by a winter sportsman reveals one of the main interests lying at the core of many of Doig's paintings: the interaction between Man and Nature. In the world of winter sports, this is a key point, as Man has shaped the environment to his own needs and whims and desires, creating slopes and jumps and resorts, the ultimate rampaging ego in the world of Arcadia. Doig's paintings tend to show man and man's creations as subservient to Nature, though-- here, as in some of Doig's other paintings on superficially different themes, despite the absence of any visual equivalent of prison bars, the human element remains entirely subsumed and consumed by the immensity of the landscape, of the world.
Suspended in the air before the viewer is the snowboarder. Rendered still by the shutter of a camera or by the Pause button on a video, the implied elegant arc of the snowboarder's jump has been halted. This creates a strange atmosphere in Pink Mountain: the image of the boarder hanging there is at once miraculous, yet is rooted in the everyday footage that we see of adventurous winter sports enthusiasts on the television.
What makes the jump all the more visually engaging in Pink Mountain is the fact that the surface that the boarder has left is not visible-- it appears, by implication, to remain behind the vantage-point of the photographer, and by extension the viewer. Instead, the boarder hangs against a background that appears to be kilometres away, heightening the sense of levitation, of flight, of an impossible feat that our knowingness as a viewer renders humdrum and everyday. This is itself accentuated by the downward angle at which we view the intrepid boarder, as though we too are floating in the firmament, looking down upon a world far, far below. There is an otherworldliness in the silence of this image: the contrast between this stillness-- which is emphasised by the stillness of the mountains -- and the movement of the winter sportsman as he sails through the air creates a mysterious tension. It both adds to the peculiar ambience while also highlighting the artifice of the painting as an 'honest' image, illustrating its roots in a camera-captured image, be it from a magazine, a snapshot or from television.
Despite the work's reference to an image that could be seen any day on a sports channel, the overall effect calls to mind the sublime, of release, of flight. Yet, while this picture appears to find the miraculous in the everyday, this sense of the sublime is quickly punctured: there is something deliberately deadpan and understated about this colossal painting's contents. The scale of the picture contrasts strangely with the worthiness of its subject, and this implied imbalance is only heightened by the image's photographic origins.
The fact that this is not an oil taken from life, but instead culled from the myriad photographic sources-- both personal and salvaged, with which Doig fills his works-- throws into question the entire nature of representation and indeed of painting. The traditional role of the artist has been subverted, the role of inspiration deliberately limited and curtailed. This is a memory of a moment, but whose memory? Whose moment? Doig's works are marked by a sense of rootless nostalgia, as though the viewer is flicking through a stranger's family photographs. This is not an image from his life or from our life; instead, it is an image taken from the life of some unidentified stranger. While this can be seen to add universality to the content, it also leaves it disembodied, anonymous.
This anonymity becomes a device that forces the viewer to pay more attention to the painting itself. Regardless of content, this five metre painting controls our gaze and the distanced nature of the source image, appropriated from no-one knows where, allows us on one level to ignore it entirely and to contemplate the picture in purely formal terms. On this level, it is as a painterly adventure that we should view it. The subject matter-- the source image-- has been deliberately faded to a point where it teeters on the brink of being unrecognisable, invisible, an effect augmented by the deliberately restrained palette. Pink Mountain mimics not only the Impressionists in its surface appearance, but also the Abstract Expressionists. The areas of the picture that form trees, cliffs, snow-banks are all rendered in a manner that recalls the brushwork of the scions of Ab-Ex-- one even wonders if the presentation of as humble an object as a photograph in a blur of pinks is itself an assault on the assumed machismo of that movement. However, Pink Mountain shares the sense of objecthood that many of those artists instilled in their works, the sense of not having to refer to the outside world, but only to the experience of the painter himself:
"there is no other responsibility than the space that is confined within the painting. I have to find out how the picture works, and making the thing is the most important of all, the execution to make it into a painting. I wouldn't do it otherwise, it's the act that is to be seen-- when you paint something it becomes a fact. At the same time, it's a question of how much you let the material take over" (Doig, quoted in H. Fricke, 'Drifter: An Interview with Peter Doig', 2004, reproduced on DB Artmag at www.deutche-bank-art.com).
In this way, as the exertion of the artist, as the product of his thoughts and efforts and skills, Pink Mountain redeems itself and lays its claim to its stupendous scale, and likewise it does so as a pure celebration of the materials-- the oils-- themselves. The picture is an adventure in oils, a journey in its own right, making it all the more pertinent that the crispest element in the composition-- the snowboarder himself-- is gliding through this painterly environment in a journey that echoes and provokes the journey of our own eyes before the monumental Pink Mountain.
Visually, Pink Mountain provides a foil to many of Doig's other works. They often present the world as viewed through a mesh of either trees, branches, snow or other such visual obstacles-- implying that even within the world of the painting the material has taken over-- whereas in Pink Mountain the only obstacle is the boarder, who is arguably the subject in his own right. Rather than the confined and imprisoned view of the world that his other paintings often afford us, here we are given a towering perspective over the world. And the fact that this is a world inhabited by a winter sportsman reveals one of the main interests lying at the core of many of Doig's paintings: the interaction between Man and Nature. In the world of winter sports, this is a key point, as Man has shaped the environment to his own needs and whims and desires, creating slopes and jumps and resorts, the ultimate rampaging ego in the world of Arcadia. Doig's paintings tend to show man and man's creations as subservient to Nature, though-- here, as in some of Doig's other paintings on superficially different themes, despite the absence of any visual equivalent of prison bars, the human element remains entirely subsumed and consumed by the immensity of the landscape, of the world.