Girl in White with Trees

The painter Peter Doig is best known for his timeless, mysterious landscapes. His inventive repertoire of motifs and his candid relationship with the great classical-modern painters place Doig at the centre of contemporary painting. He takes a marked stance in the current discourse about painting. He refuses to take up an ironic and mitigating attitude towards painting as an outmoded medium. The authenticity of his romantic approach cannot be denied. The abandonment with which he dares to lose himself in the paint and the process of painting shows a great and unswerving faith in this classical medium.

Doig works with existing visual material; often photos. In contrast to many of his colourful, heavily-worked paintings, Girl in White with Trees is built up of thin, transparent veils of paint in numerous shades of grey, blue and green. The picture can be traced to a family snapshot of his daughter taken from a window of his house in London. In the ominous leaden grey setting, Doig casually interweaves impressions of his daily surroundings with the impenetrable thoughts of a teenage girl. He succeeds once again in linking a simple photographic representation to a pre-modern, romantic view of a landscape scene.