It was mostly for my work, but I also felt that Trinidad had affected my life, and I wanted the children to have that experience. Peter Doig went from being an artist whose peers were too embarrassed to show alongside him, to possibly the most internationally loved painter of our time.

Peter Doig - The Courtauld Peter Doig - The Courtauld

Trinidad’s annual carnival, with its steel bands, “blue devils,” and non-stop street dancing, rivals New Orleans’s Mardi Gras in its feverish creativity. Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, the eldest child of a Scottish accountant and his wife, who worked in the theatre. Eerie forests absorb the light, and horizontal bands of color in the middle of the piece are muddy and dark, while the greens of the trees behind are ghostly. To me,” Doig has said, “the painting is about being complicit, being involved in something terrible. When I visited Doig in Trinidad, last spring, he drove me through Port of Spain’s congested downtown and parked his Land Rover by a high wall that encloses Lapeyrouse Cemetery, the city’s largest.With the exception of Ofili and Jenny Saville, most of his contemporaries thought that painting was obsolete. He is peering out towards the viewer with his hands aloft as if he is shielding his eyes to see into the darkness.

Peter Doig, Courtauld Gallery review — modern master holds Peter Doig, Courtauld Gallery review — modern master holds

The painting’s division into three horizontal spaces, which he has used again and again ever since, reflected the influence of Barnett Newman—“opening up his zip,” as Doig put it. Two Trees incarnates something that has haunted Doig: the problem of a white man engaging with a culture scarred by the slavery other white men visited on Africans. Boards have heavy shelf wear with bumping and fraying to corners, crushing to spine ends and rubbing and staining all over.They are reflected beneath on a still black lake in which floats a lone girl in a canoe, her tiny body enhancing the painting's sense of scale. Uncaged lions roamed the streets in Doig’s 2015 exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, in Venice.

The Mythical Stories in Peter Doig’s Paintings | The New Yorker The Mythical Stories in Peter Doig’s Paintings | The New Yorker

The houses in these early paintings look uninhabited and desolate, and you see them through a screen of trees or underbrush, or blurred by falling snow. In many ways, it's about getting a living thing from the studio to the gallery, something that has an energy.Someone had snapped a picture of them backstage, in their costumes, and twenty years later, when Doig started the “Gasthof” painting and was looking for two figures to put in it, he came across the photograph.