Name: Peter Doig - In the Studio
Uploaded: 2026-01-09T08:29:42.000Z
Duration: 9 min 32 s
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Past simple

My studio in Trinidad was in an old rum factory, the Fernandez Compound, it's called.

It's a big compound with maybe, I don't know, 20 or 30 old warehouse buildings which actually built in.

All the steelwork was shipped down from Scotland and then all the block work which filled in was made in Trinidad.

It was a big space, way too big for my usage, really.

Also allowed me to do my film club in there as well.

These two spaces, probably each about 5,000 square feet, quite dusty, not too far from what's known as La Basse, which is the town dump, basically, where they burn lots of rubbish and refuse.

So there was a kind of constant sort of smells and dust and the noise of the city traffic coming into the city.

It was close to the highway, up in the hills, just outside the windows, which weren't really windows, they were just big openings with bars.

And so you had these views outside the windows of the hillside.

Depending on the time of year, it was either quite dry or quite humid, whether it was in the dry season or the rainy season.

Painting, paint and paint reacted differently there than it did to here, which I quite liked.

I mean, the other thing was that the weather would sometimes come in and paintings would get wet from the rain or.

And sometimes they would fade, the canvas would fade.

And some of my paintings, I used these interventions.

I left these interventions and worked with them.

I think that the paintings in Trinidad were very much influenced by the city of Port of Spain.

The landscape, things I could see out of the studio window, too, now that I'm here in London, the references are different.

The references are either memory or photographic.

Whereas when I was there, I could always go and have a look that was much more in the atmosphere.

So in some ways, I'm actually going back to the way I worked prior to moving to Trinidad, because prior to moving to Trinidad, I worked very much in the way that I'm working now.

I mean, traditionally, the way I worked is, you know, on a lot of paintings at the same time, or at least I'd start a lot of paintings.

And if I found that I couldn't really move forward for whatever reason, I would.

I mean, in some cases I would abandon a painting or completely paint over it.

I mean, for instance, the painting of Alice in Bosco's Yard was actually painted over the beginnings of another painting.

I mean, none of that painting is visible anymore.

But for the most part, like the Night Bathers painting, for instance, I started a long time ago, 2010 or 2011.

I would get stuck and I put it to the side.

Maybe if I was using a certain color or something I felt that could add to it, I would.

I would go back to it, but sort of tentatively.

Other paintings as well have taken a lot of time to resolve, but

I would keep them rather than abandon them because I would think that the elements were worth pursuing.

I don't really like the term magical realism.

You know, the spaces that exist within the painting really are spaces to do with painting itself and what comes about by painting and where, as a painter, you feel you can leave it and where it's giving off to me what I want, whatever that is.

And that goes for painting a face or painting a space that may represent sky.

It's not really a painting of sky or a painting of sea.

I mean, for instance, in the Sokobug painting, this kind of sort of fumey type sea at the bottom.

When I painted that, I never really intended to leave it like that.

That would have just been part of it, something that I'd gone back into work and probably just like, left little elements of it.

But when the painting came to London, there'd been this passage of time.

I realized that I was never going to be able to recreate that.

And it actually had something that maybe I didn't realize.

Exhibiting at the Courtauld is unique for a contemporary artist because of, I think, the close proximity to painting from another era, and

particularly in my case, an era of painting that I'm very much interested in.

Over this period of time, I've realized that there's hardly a brushstroke in that room, the great room.

There's nothing sort of wanton or flailing or sort of, I don't know, gratuitous in a way.

That, to me, seems like something that's really important about the type of painting that I like.

I mean, apart from that, I think there's probably everything that you need to know about painting or can learn from painting in that room as well.

If you look at, I don't know, for instance, the Renoir painting with a small figure in the kind of field, it's kind of like there's sort of abstract qualities and sort of blurring.

A paint that predates artists by 100 years or whatever.

And then there's sort of devices in the Manet painting, for instance, that I think are really, really important about how a painting kind of operates optically for the viewer, you know, with the two sort of very sharp globes of electric light and then the softness in other parts.

I mean, there's so many, so many different things to learn from.

And you know, Cezanne, of course, with his small brush, everything that he was doing with that brush and just the importance of the material is so, so evident in his work and yet you feel a kind of a warmth for the subject.

You don't feel that it's just a sort of academic exercise in any way.

It feels like he's connected to what he's painting but it's not sentimental in a way.

So I think there's a lot, a lot to learn but also a lot to enjoy really.

I think paintings need to be enjoyed in some ways enjoyed not just the, the making but also the looking for the viewer.