It's hard to avoid the word dreamlike in relation to Peter Doig's paintings. For the most part they evoke an expansive, snow-covered world of mountains, forests and lakes, a winter wonderland of big, comfortable-looking houses and endless recreation. This is the rural Canada of his youth, imaginatively reconstituted from memory and the evidence of photos, postcards, films and any other available source.
Though it is all rendered with an extraordinary, almost hallucinatory vividness, it is also strangely remote, as though glimpsed through glaring sun or falling snow, both super-real and wholly immaterial. When he says of one work that he was trying to get the effect of "a painting as a kind of after-image", like a scene flickering in your mind as you fall asleep, he comes pretty close to articulating a common effect in his pictures.
Figures often appear in them, but they are usually tiny in relation to the scale of the picture, or vaguely indicated, or so peripheral as to be virtually invisible at first sight. Doig self-deprecatingly remarks that his approach to figures was partly determined "by my lack of real drawing ability". If so, he's made a virtue of limitation, for without doubt his distinctive treatment of figures contributes to the way we can, paradoxically, be at once distanced from and yet closely identify with what we see.
Sometimes the construction of this distance is overt, as in Night Playground, a twilight scene in which a group of blurred figures play (though even that isn't quite clear) in an open space, glimpsed through a railing in the foreground, against what looks like an urban, commercial backdrop. We are placed in a voyeuristic position in relation to the figures, glimpsing them from outside the railings.
Technically, Doig is a thoughtful and continually inventive painter, and there are a number of felicitous touches to the image, including the exaggerated, deliberately naive way he has painted the glow emanating from a row of coloured light bulbs. It is not optically correct, but it uncannily captures the sense of several sources of electric light competing with fading daylight. Details like this are central to the work's strangely evocative atmosphere.
He intimates that we would be wasting our time in trying to look for a specific narrative coherence in this or any of his pictures. "I never build a scenario like, say, Cindy Sherman" (whose work he admires). Yet his paintings seem to suggest all kinds of scenarios including, famously, Canoe-Lake, which bears a close resemblance to a still from the film Friday the 13th. In it, against a backdrop of forest, a lone figure in a canoe trails her hand in the water. We are familiar enough with the iconographic and narrative conventions of horror movies to know that something nasty is likely to happen. But true enough, the painting remains outside a specific narrative framework. It is more about a sense of heightened anticipation, a state of apparent calm underwritten by anxiety. "I like the idea that the viewer bring their own interpretation to the image," as Doig puts it simply, incidentally noting that he didn't think much of the film but quite likes the painting.
The tiny figure set against a vast, spectacular landscape sounds like a paradigm of romantic art, typified by Casper David Friedrich's Alpine wanderer finding a mystical union with sublime nature. And Doig's pictures, in their heart-felt depiction of what might be described as suburbanised nature, are thematically linked to Friedrich's romanticism. Though it may sound like a simplistic analysis, one significant difference is that in place of the formal and conceptual unity of Friedrich, Doig's curiously piecemeal painterly approach allows not only a fractured, problematic vision of nature, but a multiplicity of views in all sorts of ways, with its references to the numerous kinds of image (including for example travel supplements and pop culture), that now inform the way we look at the world.
This notion of a reconstructed, composite reality is variously evident in the paintings. It's not only the fact that they seldom seem to make sense as logical, coherent representations, though they do not. For the most part they are oddly disjointed, as though they have been awkwardly assembled rather than developed as organic wholes. Generally they are as far away from the seamless, mechanical reproduction of reality that we associate with photography as you can imagine, though he makes it clear that he works directly and closely from photographs, even down to recreating "the blips in photos". Referring to curious, amoeba-like slugs of paint in the foreground of one painting, he says that he was merely rendering the "out-of-focus leaves" that happened to be there in the print he used as a reference.
But this notion of comp ositeness applies as well in a purely physical, material sense. He is not a fluent painter with a developed facility. Rather he builds up his pictures unevenly, painstakingly and incrementally. Until his most recent work, which tends to be more even in treatment, each picture is like a catalogue demonstration of different ways to apply paint: saturated flatly into the canvas, built up in isolated lumps of impasto, carefully brushed on, offhandedly flung on in blobs. Colour, too, is unnaturalistic and out of joint. The paint-work doesn't so much describe a subject matter as develop a tension between image and marks. Sometimes it seems as if the image cannot survive the density and variety of the marks that constitute it but, somehow, it does.
This is so especially in a work such as Window Pane, in which yellow and white blobs of pigment float against a reflective surface. Although it is actually anchored to the world and does make representational sense, and in quite an uncanny way, it is one of a number of his paintings that threatens to spiral off into abstraction. While he has never made abstract paintings, he confesses that "I like the idea of a picture evolving into abstraction". In fact, when he began to explore Canadian imagery, "I started what seemed to be an abstract painting," and then representational motifs suggested themselves.
Canada has been an exceptionally fruitful source of imagery, but he is at pains to point out that the paintings "are not about Canada". Born in Scotland in 1959, his family moved just a year later to the Caribbean and then, in 1966, to Canada, where he grew up. In 1979 he returned to Britain to attend art school at Wimbledon and St Martins. After a couple of years at home later in the decade, he was back in London as an MA student at Chelsea. But, he recalls, at Chelsea "I felt out of it. I wasn't interested in the kind of neo-minimalist art that was being made."
The kind of painting for which he has become known began as a reaction "against my own work. That's often the way: things annoy you and you try to get rid of them." Perhaps feeling nostalgic or homesick, he referred to Canadian imagery, looking again at the Canadian landscape painters whose work was then largely disregarded. He was trying to find a way of treating fairly ordinary material, "houses, weather, people in the landscape" in a way that was true to his own experience. "I began to use snow as a metaphor for looking back, you know, the way it's often used as a visual code to recall another, better time."
His sources are second and third-hand. He'll cheerfully take a contrived image from a fishing holiday advertisement and translate it into a two-metre painting, but he doesn't condescend to his material or treat it ironically. This, apart from the fact that he is a painter, sets him apart from the main current of British art in the 1990s.
Indeed one of the primary strengths of his work is that it reaches out to areas of common experience in terms of a fund of imagery and references to which we can instantly relate. It is all real, all personal, all meant.
"I like the idea of bringing things back into painting; I mean ordinary things. Instead of big heroic themes I'd say I paint a lot of minor subjects and hope to give them some kind of weight through the act of painting. What I'm trying to do is to find images in unexpected places, and to find unexpected resonance in those images."
Almost Grown, paintings by Peter Doig is at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until July 22nd
