Orange Forest

'I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there, but it's not a scientific process. I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of. We have all seen incredible sunsets. We've all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects, and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting'
(P. Doig, quoted in Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132).

Set against a scintillating, magical night sky, shadowy forms of pine trees loom in the foreground of Peter Doig's enchanting Orange Forest. Exquisitely rendered in the artists atmospheric-abstract technique using an opus of textures such as glazes, spots and sprays, the present work evocatively expresses Doig's memories of his Canadian upbringing, a theme that has distinctly flavoured so many of his great paintings. Painted in 1999, when the artist was living in London, much of his work from this period such as Green Trees (1998) and Orange Sunshine (1995) are informed by the artists memories of the verdant Canadian landscape.

Created in the midst of an urban art movement defined by the cool, detached conceptual art of the Young British Artists, here was a Scottish-born artist who had spent his early life in rural Canada. Standing in contrast to his YBA contemporaries whose practice was ensconced in Post-Minimalist and conceptual rhetoric, Doig distinguished himself as a painters painter, but one whose practice is informed by the postmodern discourse of his generation, speaking to the tradition of Conceptualism, appropriation art, and Neo-expressionism. In Orange Forest Doig has almost breathed a panoply of coloured glazes onto the canvas with hints of lilac and apple-green emerging from a maelstrom of orange and crimson hues creating an effect that is redolent of the Aurora Borealis. Reflecting on this sensory experience, Doig remarked: 'I often use heightened colours to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there, but its not a scientific process. I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of. We have all seen incredible sunsets. Weve all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects, and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting' (P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract), 2001', in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 132). Punctuating this supernatural scene are white spots that are reminiscent of sparkling stars in the sky or the crystallised snowflakes that populate much of Doigs work.

Throughout his distinguished career, Doig's work has operated through a process of displacement, recording his own experiences of relocation. As Adrian Searle once commented, 'journey's real and metaphorical, places of arrival and departure, no-man's lands between waking and sleeping, and the slippage between the present and the past, the real and the imaginary, are the territories of Doig's art' (A. Searle, A Kind of Blankness in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 52). Although Doig lived in Canada from 1966-1979 and 1986-1989 it was not until he moved to London to attend the Chelsea School of Art that he began to re-visit the Canadian landscapes of his childhood, often unintentionally. Expanding on the absence pervading his work, Doig described, 'A lot of the paintings aren't of Canadian subjects, but somehow they always end up looking Canadian - it's strange. I'm aware that I can't get away from Canada, because my formative years were spent there. During the time that I returned to Canada I tried to make a painting of the landscape en plein-air, and I found it impossible to have either a focus or distance on that image. I was much more comfortable with looking at something on a page, as a way to contain the image. On my return I would go to Canada House in London and look through the brochures advertising holidays in northern Canada. And I discovered a whole set of images that refer to this almost dream-like notion of what these places are actually like, images that described an almost idealized idea of the wilderness experience (P. Doig, quoted in A. Searle, K. Scott & C. Grenier, Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 131)
The idiosyncratic colour palette employed by Doig while redolent of the Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard's landscapes, also adds a surreal, dreamlike quality which sets Doigs practice apart from this world and vivifies the pigment. Just as Bonnard so masterfully achieved, Doig expresses his own ambition: 'somehow he is painting the space that is behind the eyes. It's as if you were lying in bed trying hard to remember what something looked like. And Bonnard managed to paint that strange state. It is not a photographic space at all. It is a memory space, but one which is based on reality' (P. Doig, quoted in 'Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract)', 2001, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 142).