Peter Doig: famous artists 'are quickly forgotten'

peter deugg is the most commercially successful scottish artist you probably will never have heard of in 2007 one of his paintings sold for more than seven million pounds a record of the time for a living european artist he now lives in trinidad but for the first time he's exhibiting in his birthplace edinburgh he gave katie razzle his first interview before the show opens imaginary boys on a dream-like boat ride a ghostly figure in a tree at night a man caught in a shaft of sunlight entering a peter doig exhibition is like falling into dream yeah well i guess i was trying to paint a drifter someone adrift someone kind of like in between in between worlds between places the sense of in between looms large in deug's work his paintings evoke places between the real and the imaginary this man was somebody deut photographed years before and i just like i like this coat i like his boots i'd once seen johnny cash at the airport and he was dressed very similar to that in a sort of full-length suede coat with a big eagle on the back doig often uses photographs as a starting point a white horse is reinterpreted in paint a blurry self-portrait is reinvented what i find really boring is when when artists just copy photographs channel 4 news first met deut 20 years ago he'd won the john moores prize for his painting blotter a figure standing alone in an ice scape back then he was struggling to pay the bills and the 20 000 prize money made a real difference as i opened this pile of mail and all of it being bills including letters from the credit card company saying chop your credit cards in half and send them back to us now and this was the last one i opened and it was 4 30 in the morning and i didn't sleep if you look back on yourself then i mean would you have ever thought that your career would go the way it has no i couldn't possibly imagined it and i don't think there were any examples of it either really at that point in time only sort of far-fetched examples you know artists from the past maybe this exhibition is set against a backdrop of major commercial success canoes are a serial motif and in 2007 a painting white canoe disappeared from public view after being sold for seven million pounds it was an auction record for a living european artist doi could let it go years before for just a thousand pounds what did you think i think it was quite disturbing in some ways because um it seemed like such a sort of totally crazy amount of money um to pay for one of my paintings um as the auction houses they talk they you know they talk about masterpieces and things like that i mean there's no such thing as a a a masterpiece contemporary masterpiece you know that can't be decided by within your own time really it's and it's it's all it's it's kind of marketing really back in the 90s deug's expressive handling of paint wasn't in vogue it was the heyday of the ybas young british artists and their grandstanding conceptualism which made him unpopular at a show at london's serpentine gallery i don't think i was the one i don't think i was the roommate of choice nobody wanted to be with a peter deutch i don't know if no one wanted to be but i remember like people didn't really want to be in that room at the time but you know i can see why too the work my work looked very different to everyone else's i mean everyone else was making it was a kind of minimal aesthetic really fair enough it did it wasn't a good fit but it's lasted well possibly let's see for how long there's no need to finish painting until it has to go out the door for this national galleries of scotland show though deug was still finishing a work as it was being hung i just worked on the ma on his mask it wasn't right it just was it was this is something i didn't like about it yeah so lucky brought you paints i'd spot paint all right you went out and bought some the show is billed as a homecoming for an artist who left scotland as a baby it's the intensity and vibrancy of trinidad where doig has lived for more than a decade that leaves a more lasting impression you

Channel: Channel 4 News

Views: 246,790

Keywords: Art, Peter Doig, US, UK, Exhibition

Id: rVzxWFRrYD4

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2013