Peter Doig

Dialogues of friendship and leisure.

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Peter Doig is known internationally for paintings of landscapes and canoes, his vibrant colours inspired by his upbringing in Canada, Trinidad and London. Many of these works have garnered significant acclaim and sales. Now, an exhibition at The Courtauld presents Doig’s art for the first time in a decade in Britain, where he has been based since 2021. While familiar alpine and Trinidadian themes inform this new work, Doig’s focus on the figure comes to the fore.

Notable paintings, such as Alpinist, revisit Doig’s love of skiing. Painting a skier in a harlequin costume gestures to the jester-as-outsider archetype long loved by artists, but it perches here in the context of leisure. Begun in 2019 in Trinidad, Doig worked on it in the Swiss resort community of Zermatt and completed it in London. Alpinist graces the cover of Doig’s exhibition catalogue and posters, emphasizing figuration, which also features strongly in an accompanying exhibition at the gallery, Etchings for Derek Walcott.

Shown at The Courtauld for the first time, this series of 19 etchings was made in response to Doig’s friend, the poet Derek Walcott, whom Doig met in 2014 in Trinidad. Walcott, born on the West Indies island of Saint Lucia, received a 1992 Nobel Prize and spent three years as a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, starting in 2009. Before his death in 2017, Walcott published Morning, Paramin, a collection of poems that responded to Doig’s paintings. The etchings continue this friendly exchange in a visual conversation with both sombre and uplifting tones.

Derek (STUDIOFILMCLUB) is a poster for Walcott’s reading of Morning, Paramin at Doig’s Trinidad studio as part of his weekly STUDIOFILMCLUB screenings. Doig depicts Walcott, who also painted, at an easel. In this work, Walcott paints the title of his book of poems with a restful and focused expression on his face. He is clad in soft white clothes, the drape of which echoes an aurora-like background of fresh and earthy tones, honouring a moment of rest and contentment, as well as the reciprocity of friendship. It is the softest of the works and the only one that makes significant use of colour, recalling the vivid beauty of printmaking and posters.

Across from Derek (STUDIOFILMCLUB) is Untitled (Derek), an etching that adapts the painting for the poster in black and white tones. Although the lack of colour is stark, the etching is not spare. The texture of the palm frond behind Walcott seems sharp but captures Doig’s impressionistic sense of movement with looser shadowy lines so a breeze can almost be felt across its surface. The work emphasizes Walcott’s leisurely but concentrated gaze and draws out the infinite ways of seeing a friend.

Several etchings depict skiers in solitary and shadowed poses. They seem sinister on first glance, but also bring to mind moments of calm and preparation before heading into the light, where solitude can be like a cool shade.

The final work is tonal and abstract. Untitled (Dark Skiers from ‘Ski Jacket’) revisits details from Doig’s 1994 painting Ski Jacket, which received Britain’s Turner Prize. The figures here are much more fluid and shimmering, echoing the ways we can be transformed by the company of others: we become porous, present and open to change. ■

The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig and Peter Doig: Etchings for Derek Walcott at The Courtauld in London from Feb. 10 to May 29, 2023. 

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The Courtauld

Strand (Somerset House), City of London, WC2R 0RN, England

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