THE TRIUMPH OF PAINTING SAATCHI GALLERY EDUCATION ...

Peter Doig
The Grasshopper
1990
Oil on canvas
79 x 98 inches
The Grasshopper exemplifies the formal unconventionality of Doig’s painting. The artist places the
viewer at ground level, mimicking the experience of an actual grasshopper. Its radical composition – 3
broad bands of colour – is reminiscent of modernist movements like De Stijl or the abstract
expressionism of Rothko, whilst its realism and impasto painterliness owe more to the Impressionists.
Broadly coloured yet intricately detailed, the composition appears to mimic the geological strata which
construct the earth.
The top band contains an abstracted sky, created from thin veils of vivid blue masked with successive
layers of dragged and dabbed paint. The middle band contains the land, an arid landscape in which a
small dwelling stands, isolated. The telegraph poles and lines are the only clue to a connection with the
developed world. The heavy, rocky band of terrain in the foreground has the effect containing the
domestic settlement, suggestive of the individual’s – and the artist’s – isolation and containment.
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 and winner the John Moores Foundation Prize the previous year,
Peter Doig is known for his exploration of the formal and thematic possibilities of landscape. His
experimental approach to surface, texture and colour puts him among the most inventive painters of his
generation. Using film stills, footage of actual events or photographs of urban and natural
environments, Peter Doig’s work emanates a quiet nostalgia. His paintings convey a sense of borrowed
memory, of peering into an intimate realm of past experience – of place and self.
Doig acknowledges the ‘shared experience effect’ of his paintings, but distances himself from a linear
reading. ‘People often say that my paintings remind them of particular scenes from films or from certain
passages from books, but I think it’s a different thing altogether. There is something more primal about
painting’. The act of applying paint, layering images on top of one another, involving oneself physically
with the surface of the object undermines the value of the borrowed image and reasserts the primacy of
the act.
Discuss Doig’s use of colour.
‘I always strive to prevent the paint itself becoming overly prioritized’ How does Doig
achieve this?
‘A lot of the work deals with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world
meets the natural world’ How does Doig explore the relationship between the natural
and artificial?