Playing and Painting at Night: Thoughts on Peter Doig
About the similarities and differences between painting and playing racquetball...
Last year, in April, I went to the Peter Doig exhibition at the Courtauld. The exhibition was a big deal for Doig, who completed many paintings ahead of its opening. He was born in Scotland but spent his early years in Trinidad. I first saw his work at an exhibition in Mayfair in 2017, in a small gallery overwhelmed by the high number of visitors ushered there by good reviews. I’ve loved and found his paintings intriguing ever since.
All of Doig’s paintings are figurative. There are usually people, and there are always places. When he went to art school, in London in the early 1980s, figuration was beginning to come back into fashion, though Doig must have endured countless questions across his career, about whether he considers figurative painting to be dead, or to have run its course. But however figurative, his paintings could never be praised, or denigrated, for their realism. Even when they take place in recognisable, particular territory – like one in this exhibition, of an evening on Regent’s Canal – the atmosphere is dreamlike, mixing the familiar with the strange.
Doig’s people hover on the boundary between person and figure. Things are happening to them but they don’t tend to emote, and often seem immersed in contemplation – a girl lying in a hammock; a painter focused on their easel as waves crash in the background; and an alpinist, dressed mysteriously in harlequin costume, gravely gathering himself, against the distant, towering Matterhorn, in a moment of prayer-like stillness. He looks like he’s about to jump but his feet are rooted to the floor, as if encased in ice. Some of them turn their backs, like the musician Shadow, pioneer of Trinidadian soca, crossing the street in his full-length black coat, clutching his guitar over one shoulder. They are luminous people doing vivid things – swimming, voyaging, skiing: modern, secular activities in which Doig perceives the deliberate solemnity of ritual. People transform as they carry out these activities, like a priest putting on vestments, effaced of their everyday personality. Their faces acquire the masked enigma of the ritual practitioner, their particular personhood both hardening and softening into the inscrutability of the figure.
They float a little, as if not seriously bound to whatever place we find them in. There’s a blue woman reclining on a moonlit beach, but the sand is behind her body, rather than beneath it. That two-dimensionality, the childlike flatness, makes me think of Matisse, and like Matisse Doig is an exuberant colourist. The colours enhance the sense of dream: the woman is enigmatically blue.
He likes to paint at night, and stayed up late to finish lots of the paintings in this exhibition. Living in Trinidad, he revels in that abrupt, unshifting tropical night that comes down like a curtain at half six: ‘what you realise here is that half the day is night’ he tells Calvin Tomkins, his profiler in The New Yorker). The first painting I saw is ‘Night Studio (Studiofilm and Racquet Club)’, a self-portrait (my own photo of it is above). You look up at the artist as he leans back, his bald head slightly blank and skull-like but his body, in a blue t-shirt and white trainers, bright and alive. The studio floor is the same colour as in Matisse’s ‘Red Studio’. He’s leaning against a canvas, a painting from the 2000s called ‘Stag’ of a man looping an arm round a tree – you can see the lush foliage. The living artist, uncannily flattened, looks as if he might be sucked back into the dreamier realm of his work. It’s a powerful, arresting painting, but what most intrigues me about it is what’s happening in its left-hand margin. Through a grid of dark brown squares you glimpse a white wall, marked faintly into sections and crossed with diagonal lines of shadow; beneath it there’s a green square on which two small figures, grey stick-men effaced of all personal character, swing racquets.
Interviews with Doig emphasise his love of company: the ‘Studiofilm’ part of the subtitle refers to the film club he hosts for his friends at the Trinidad studio. He also enjoys sport: in the 80s, he played ice hockey in London for the Romford Raiders, and is a keen skier. In Trinidad he plays racquetball, and what we see in this painting is perhaps a glimpse of the Racquet Club in Port-of-Spain. Racquetball is more popular in the Americas than in Europe: it’s like squash, with two players hitting against the same wall, but the ball is much bouncier and the ceiling is in play, though in this court there seems to be no ceiling, just high rafters with blobs of harsh, white, halogen light.
What’s the relation between these two spaces, the artist’s studio and the racquet club? The straight edge of the second resting canvas, and the grid, mark one world off from another, as if the racquet club is one of the distant places Doig habitually paints (a painter of ‘elsewhere’, Stéphan Aquin calls him). On the other hand, the grid might be nothing but a mesh, as if Doig can look into the racquet club from his studio window. Both are nocturnal places, their colours possessing the same lurid gaudiness that only appears under artificial light. ‘Stag’ is a dark painting, in which the tree and its bountiful fruit is mysteriously spotlit. The green square in which the players move suggests to me an acrylic tennis court, or that the muted colours of a racquetball court have been dreamily enhanced. Either way that green evokes a kind of uncanny, nocturnal pastoral.
The racquetball players have each other for company, though during the game the company becomes a competitive opposition: the share the same space but they are vying for mastery of it. Afterwards they’ll have a drink and a chat. But painting, like writing, is remorselessly solitary. Doig’s self-portrait is of a sociable, affable man who must force himself to work alone, for hours, who invites his friends over for films only to linger afterwards, painting the whole night long. If art is more solitary than sport, it’s also more commonly exalted for its profound importance – though lots of those who would uphold that hierarchy would protest the distinction of art and craft, as if composing symphonies and brewing IPA are comparable. Painting and racquetball certainly occupy different cultural niches. Sport fits more easily with a normal life under capitalism, even when it’s played at night: a slice of leisure, a temporary restoration to the related exuberances of chance and the body, which must end when the lights turn off and the club closes; but art can go on and on, imagining a world beyond the manufactured realism of the status quo, through the night.
To me, despite these differences, the painting suggests an equivalence between the painters and the players. The conditions under which we live are always pushing our nights towards one of two extremes: the phase of rest, of crashing and sleeping before another long day of work; and the periodic frenzy, the night out where we stay up consuming as many substances and experiences as we can. To spend time on something pleasurable, whose difficulty demands intense attention – on painting pictures, or playing racquetball – allows for the evasion of this nocturnal binary; it allows us to reclaim the night for ourselves. Doig’s work is alive to the goofiness of sport, the childlike silliness of those racquetball players in strange and jaunty shapes; the unwieldy skis balanced on the alpinist’s back. But he also understands, and celebrates, the similarly childlike playfulness of painting. Sometimes sport and painting are nothing more than cheerful activities, ways to have fun. But just as a painting comes alive, possessed of strange and moving power, sometimes the heavy skis become animated and light; sometimes the racquet seems to fuse with the hand.
About This Substack
Thanks for reading. I hope some of the themes that appear in this post (art and creativity, attention, playing, life under late capitalism) will come back. And running through lots, though not all of them, is the theme that gives this Substack its name – the night.