A modernist artist born in Edinburgh, Peter Doig grew up in a family with his father in the shipping business. The family lived various places including Quebec and Trinidad. In 1979, he moved to England where he attended the art schools at Wimbleton and St. Martin’s. Then he moved to Montreal, but returned to England in 1989, staing for the next ten years and taking a master’s degree at the Chelsea School of Art. In 2002, he settled in Trinidad.
His painting, primarily landscapes, seems to reflect his peripatetic youth, as though he is ever on the edge of wilderness, and is expressing a “special sense of space, not of course the ‘wide open space’ of the Great Plains but something more mysterious and impenetrable.” (Schwabsky 170) Many of his works reflect snowy scenes of Canada as well as influences from Norwegian Edvard Munch and French artists Claude Monet and Gustav Klimt. Frequently he works from photographs that either he has found or has taken himself.
Sources include:
“Glimpes Beyond the Edge”, Art in America, Barry Schwabsky, May 2008
“Peter Doig”, Wikipedia
Biography from the Archives of AskART.