If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old Peter Doig the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993, was over 8ft x 7ft. The pictures in his current show at the Courtauld are so big that only 12 of them fit in the gallery space.
Lovers of paint owe Doig a debt of gratitude for rescuing the medium from the conceptual doldrums
‘Blotter’ was a dreamlike image based on a photo of the artist’s brother standing on a frozen lake in Canada, where Doig spent most of his childhood.
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