From the library - Peter Doig

Blizzard seventy-seven starts with grainy photos on yellowish paper; you try to make a story of them. Then the foreword to this catalogue of three exhibitions in Germany (moving to the Whitechapel Gallery) in ?1997: “the atmospheric denseness of the pictures, which the spectator confronts as if entering an environment which activates all the senses, is an expression of a formidable painterly authenticity.”

These are “canvases which suffuse manifestations of the landscape not with nostalgia, but with the terror of anticipation (or vice versa)”; he maintains “a strangely calm sense of forboding”. Yes the paintings do have idiosyncratic (impressionist?) colour schemes.

Three essays give the background to, and analyse, three paintings: Buffalo Station; Night Playground; Daytime Astronomy.

Blotter is well known – and here’s a research photo - interesting to see how it turned out. The story I heard is that Doig and his brother had to flood the ice somehow to get that watery effect -Two of my favourites, which were in the Tate exhibition last year, are Young Bean Farmer and Ski Jacket