Artist Birthday: Peter Doig

Peter Doig is a Scottish painter who has lived in Canada, London, Trinidad for 20 years, and now back in London. He focuses on both landscapes and figures, melding art historical and personal references into painterly abstractions with distinctive compositions. His affecting snapshots of contemporary existence—such as a childhood ski trip or an orange canoe—Doig’s works are both diaristic and universally relevant.

Artist birthday for 17 April: Peter Doig (born 1959 Scotland)

Peter Doig is a Scottish painter whose works often document his memories of his life in Canada, Trinidad, and London.

Peter Doig, Pink Snow, 1991, oil on canvas, 243.5 x 198 cm  The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2025 Peter Doig / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York  (MOMA-P0595digars)

Typical of Doig's paintings, Pink Snow is a landscape containing a solitary figure. Born in Edinburgh, Doig was moved at age 3 to Trinidad, and then at the age of 7 to Canada. He moved to London in 1979 to study art. Pink Snow was painted following his getting his MFA from Chelsea School in London (1989-1990), and having studied at Wimbledon School of Art (1979-1980), and Saint Martin's School (1980-1983). The painting evokes memories at his parents' cabin in Ontario (Echo Lake). The snow scene prevents the viewer from seeing a needle-sharp view of his memory, a running theme through his painting on the fallibility of the precise accuracy of memory. Doig achieved this with an overall scrubbing of the surface to reveal the numerous colors of the work under the snow. Even the figure is partially "erased", perhaps symbolizing Doig's part-there-part-not there idea about depicting memories.

By the late 1970s, numerous iterations of "rebellion against traditional painting had come and gone, but not the on-going debate over the relevance of, or the supposed "end of painting." By the 1980s and 1990s, many younger painters had come to the conclusion that they no longer had to worry about perpetuating or tearing down a particular tradition in painting. They saw the moment as an opportunity to move on and start building new paradigms for the new millennium. The history of the deconstruction of existing painting norms in the 1960s and 1970s was so extensive that artists were in the position to create new concepts in their painting that would be meaningful in the changed world and new (i.e. digital and internet) narratives of the 2000s.

There was a renewed attention to the formal aspects of art. This included properties of media, a definition of abstraction, and the criteria necessary for narratives. These concerns all found outlets in the work of critics and exhibitions presented in galleries and museums starting in the earliest years of the 2000s. These outlets advocated for a return to the appreciation of the visual rather than conceptual pleasure in art, e.g. beauty rather than process. This phenomenon extended beyond painting to include sculpture, photography and video.

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, but lives and works in Trinidad. He grew up in Trinidad and Canada and studied art in London. By the 1990s he had already established a reputation for his semi-abstract landscapes, which he has said are a mixture of Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and Canadian landscape painters. The influence of Group of Seven abstract landscape painters Emily Carr (1871-1945) and David Milne (1882-1953) are particularly evident in Doig's work. Doig is very famous for his works that include (usually abandoned) canoes and the series Lapeyrouse Wall, which, like many of his compositions offer not only quiet contemplation of everyday places, but also evoke feelings of isolation that may be an indication of the isolation human beings in the 2000s can feel in a world dominated by electronic communication.