{"id":959,"date":"2026-08-02T14:51:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T14:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/?p=959"},"modified":"2026-08-07T09:01:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T09:01:51","slug":"research-task-5-2-peter-doig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/research-task-5-2-peter-doig\/","title":{"rendered":"Research task 5.2 \u2022 Peter Doig"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Brief<\/summary>\n
The photographic image is usually the starting point for painter Peter Doig, often combined with memory. He then makes some studies on paper before building up layers of oil on canvas. Have a look online for images of his work and listen to the BP Artist Talk: Peter Doig and Adrian Searle in Conversation<\/a>, available and organised by Tate.\n\nReflect on how he describes his painting process. Do you think the planning stage is important, or is it more about allowing the image to emerge through materiality and process? Make some reflections in your learning log.<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n
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I had heard of Peter Doig but was not familiar with his work. In the interview<\/a>, he describes working in layers of diluted oil paint. He uses photographs as sketches and explains how the 2008 Man Dressed as Bat (Night)<\/em> was inspired by the shadow of a little sculpture on his wall and how he proceeded to take pictures from different angles to settle on a composition. He uses his camera as a way of drawing. Then he applies the paint as thin layers: he says this allows him to redraw lightly over and over again. Sometimes he also removes paint or work through damages (he mentioned one of his canvas being damaged by rain which he then used and expanded). He doesn’t like for things to happen quickly: a painting may take him 15 hours to complete but he will spend these 15 hours over a course of six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He also talked about using imagery from film as a source of inspiration. One of my favourite painting was Bather<\/em> (2019-23) exhibited at the Courtauld<\/a>. This represents a young man which fills the canvas. He’s standing on the shore against a highly desaturated background. This, we are told, was a recurring figure in Peter Doig\u2019s work and was inspired by a black-and-white photograph of the actor Robert Mitchum posing on a beach in 1942. The painting is very atmospheric but also suggestive of the labour that went into it. The use of blue lines around the hands act as a focal point. The use of yellow in the hair and the background also gives rhythm to the painting. It’s altogether quite impressive. Zooming in on the details, you can see how the figure was not drawn precisely but drawn and redrawn in  the diluted paint. The cool temperature also contrast with the experience of the seaside which gives a ghostly appearance to the figure. It’s fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Bather. Peter Doig (2019-23). Pigment on linen, 250 x 200 cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Searching further about his process, I found a “guide to painting<\/a>” he published in the Guardian in 2009 where he mentions several starting points for a painting, one could be using photographs, either from images he’s seen in them or from things he photographed. Photographs can act as a scaffold for perspective or dimensions. The photographic element, however, is only a part of the composition. Another starting point is a drawing or a memory. In the interview he mentioned drawing a figure several times so that when it came to paint it, it felt very familiar and he could paint it fairly quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You get a sense however that these starting points are only triggers rather than full plans. He explains that he reacts to the material quality of the painting and even on materials “being around, used and visible”. He also reacts to what happens during the making of a painting, looking for surprises. Above all, he doesn’t follow a “procedure”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reflections<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The idea of building something slowly, through transparent build ups, is something I would like to work on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m also interested in redoing and repeating. I’m reminded of Allison Katz who mentioned that she painted a 100 mini-portraits of a portrait by Corot and was frustrated that she couldn’t make one portrait look like another until she realised “looking is the act of refreshment, it cannot be contained.” Like Doig, she also has repeating motifs through her work (she painted many cabbages or cockerels). I find this appealing somehow, not unlike the work by Katherine Bernhardt<\/a> I had researched earlier on. The repetition can be inside the canvas or across canvases, the atmosphere also can be quite different: Doig certainly uses one image as an inspiration for many paintings like the Man dressed as Bat<\/em> or the Bather<\/em> which appear across several paintings which convey very different moods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also like the idea of using imagery from film stills or photograph I took as a starting point but not as a “diktat” for the whole composition. This reminded me of collages where you bring elements together to form the final composition and also of the exhibition of Wes Anderson’s film paraphernalia<\/a> (which I saw in Paris and in London!). I love his work and perhaps could use some of his imagery as a starting point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I feel I am thinking more than I am painting but I am now finding some comfort in hearing other artists expressing the same feeling! Whether Peter Doig confiding “The hardest thing for me has always been what to paint and why – I spend more time thinking about this than painting” or Allison Katz who says she’s “not someone who just wants to paint all the time.” There is this constant pull between making and thinking. I think (!) I still need to find the right balance as my best thinking also happens on the back of my making. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So in other words, to answer the original question whether I think the planning stage is important or whether it is more important to allow the image to emerge through materiality and process… I would say planning is important to set an intention (e.g., in Doig’s words, to figure out what am I going to paint and why) but I am beginning to understand that once that intention is set, I can also allow myself more freedom to let the picture emerge through materiality and process. I am also learning that I can play a little more between the tension of planning and emergence through repetition. There is a vast territory between a fully pre-determined outcome rendered once as an ultra-realistic reproduction and a fully emergent “intuitive” painting which is edited through endless reactions to the materiality of paint (which in my experience ends up in mud!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I had heard of Peter Doig but was not familiar with his work. In the interview, he describes working in layers of diluted oil paint. He uses photographs as sketches and explains how the 2008 Man Dressed as Bat (Night) was inspired by the shadow of a little sculpture on his wall and how he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1,3,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-coursework","category-project-5","category-research-reflection","has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1017,"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions\/1017"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaelle-artstudio.com\/plog2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}