Art

Back in fashionable 1995 the young painter A… M… was finishing his MA at Goldsmiths College. He exercised his right to ask for a tutorial from any painter of his choosing. ‘No,’ replied the then head of the course, ‘Peter Doig is the most boring painter alive.’ Was Doig ‘boring’ back then, and is he still ‘boring’ now?

Staring at one of Doig’s many hallucinogenic pictures at Tate Britain induces rapture (rather than boredom), sucking you in, then blowing you away. There are things he does with paint to achieve sky, soil or tarmac – sometimes resembling fungus, mould or the microscopic view of a virus – that you just can’t begin to understand. His landscapes, executed largely indoors with no view, really tell you what painting is about: description of a certain mind’s view of the world, evoked and conveyed clearly by the learnt skill of pushing oil around canvas. Doig said around 1990 that he wanted to simplify the content of his paintings to allow for more interpretation from the viewer, with less of him telling us what to read.

So here’s a reading of my current favourite, ‘Figures in Red Boat’: the six figures represent the Group of Seven, a bunch of early twentieth-century Canadian landscape painters. The absent seventh is Tom Thomson, who influenced the group and died mysteriously on a lake. They are dressed in white, sleeves rolled up against the unbearable Trinidadian heat. Their red boat, also having come all the way from snowy Canada, is melting. They’re ghosts coming to say hello to Doig, like all the figures in his haunted canvases; some are conjured by the painter, some come of their own free will.