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LONDON — When you drive through Toronto's northeastern suburbs on the Don Valley Parkway, your eye is momentarily caught by a marginal flash of garish colour in the grass beside the six-lane highway. Someone, long ago, has painted a crude rainbow on the entrance of a lonely pedestrian underpass, a sad and fading trace of desperate humanity on this unwelcoming slab of nature.
For the past several weeks, this most tellingly Canadian scene has been a source of fascination to hundreds of thousands of people in the British capital. That suburban Toronto touchstone, glimpsed from a passing truck in 1994 and rendered across a huge canvas in watery stripes of lurid oil, is visible everywhere in London these days: on posters and lamp-post banners, on catalogue covers, in big spreads published in every newspaper.
It serves as an invitation to step inside a vision of man and nature that can only, I believe, have been forged in the Canadian experience – a new genre that might be called Stoner Naturalism, in which the crushing weight of wilderness leaves the viewer small, dazzled and distinctly freaked out. The painting's title, Country Rock, might be a manifesto.
Just as Turner was dazzled a century and a half ago by the industrial-gas sunsets here on the banks of the Thames, today's Europeans are experiencing a similar shock of painterly discovery in the ravine behind the high school, in the police car pulling up to the lake behind the cottage, on that awful stretch of Highway 401 between Montreal and Toronto.
Peter Doig has turned these slush-encrusted visions of the Canadian periphery into the continent's biggest art sensation. The Tate Britain's current 25-year retrospective of his works has become the most talked-about exhibition in London, receiving pure adulation from the art press and the mass media. The venerable gallery's curators say they have been astonished by the public response to a painter who was, until now, considered a painter's painter, a favourite of the gallery elite; its eight rooms are jammed every day. As if to quantify this, Doig last year became the most expensive living artist in Europe when one of his paintings, White Canoe, changed hands for almost $12-million at Sotheby's.
What are people seeing here? Why are the British critics calling him the 21st-century Turner, the Winslow Homer of the postwar years? On one level, you realize, it is simply great painting, not just technically but as pure, exciting narrative: Doig has an uncanny skill in grabbing you by the shoulders and pointing you at a scene of almost cinematic intensity; his canvases give you the sense that something is about to happen just beyond the edge, just below that weird smear of pink paint in the snowstorm, just as soon as the slouched-over guy finishes walking across the half-frozen pond.
You can talk about his influences – there is, in his dazzling oils, a lot of the stripped-down ponds and pathways of David Milne, the sky explosions of Paterson Ewen and a good swath of the jazzed-up nature of Monet and Lawren Harris, and, since he moved to Trinidad in 2002, some sunnier vibes of Paul Gauguin's mystery visitors, who populate the edges of tropical lakes that seem every bit as alienating as the Canadian ones of the 1990s.
But you cannot get away from the very singular set of things that he is painting. There are many canoes on many lakes here, but these are not the transcendent, welcoming lakes of Tom Thomson. The boats seem lost, the lakes cruel. There are a lot of people standing on frozen ponds, examining the ground below them, leaving you unsure where they start and it ends (his two greatest snowy-lake works are titled Window Pane and Blotter, and the LSD-label names are not needed to elevate the experience of being stuck alone and confused in the melting snow to the level of a universal truth). There are buildings that always seem to be in the process of being devoured, the scary banality of nature exposing the futility of architecture.
Sadness, Doig once said, is “a pervasive mood in the work,” and this is the sadness of the median strip, the sadness of the need to hitchhike in the snow. “A lot of the work deals with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world,” he told one interviewer. “Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices … a lot of the paintings portray a sense of optimism that can often be read as being a little desperate, like the image of a rainbow painted around the entrance to an underpass.”
Many of us had believed, until now, that these were very private sort of things experienced by a small clan of people living north of the 49th parallel, incomprehensible to outsiders. For Europeans, Canada was represented by those Emily Carr visions of a benign and spiritually engaging nature, or perhaps by Harris's rows of simple shacks against a big forest – nature that wanted you in it.
It took someone like Doig, a non-Canadian, to tell the world something far truer about the Canadian relationship with nature: We fear and detest it, perhaps more than anyone else. It is always there on the edge, threatening to overthrow us.
Born in Scotland, he was raised first in Trinidad and then all over Canada by his peripatetic parents, attending alternative high schools and working at bars in Toronto. He tossed this all aside when he went to art school in London in the early 1980s, painting funky album-cover art that left him cold. Then, around 1990, he briefly moved back to Montreal and had an epiphany: The blank, stoned strolls through the strange woodlots of his youth weren't irrelevant memories, they were essential truths.
“I was trying to come to terms with the Canadian part of my life,” he told curator Kitty Scott. “I left Canada when I was 19. I really wanted to get away. I felt bored. London seemed to be where the things I was interested in were coming from. Going back to Canada when I was a little bit older, I realized how much I had absorbed there. It now felt important.”
The humans in his paintings are sympathetic figures. You tend to root for them, when you see them. Sometimes they are vaguely familiar – the haunting guy in the canoe, staring straight at you from a hospital-green lake, is, you suddenly realize, the late Berry Oakley from the Allman Brothers, and the helpless air of stoner death fills the canvas. The guy covering his face inconsolably by the lake could be your dead friend's dad. Sometimes the human in the painting is an architect, as in his stunning series of an abandoned Le Corbusier complex condemned to ruin by the encroaching forest, like Tom Thomson pines turned into Freddy Krueger.
You're rooting for these people, and against the humid press of nature. No wonder Canadians have one of the worst environmental records, with no hope on the Kyoto Protocol: We know it's wrong, but, deep down, do we really want that map-filling slab of green stuff to win?
You can't help thinking of Margaret Atwood's discovery of the ur-Canadian metaphor in Survival: “Our central idea is one which generates, not the excitement and sense of adventure or danger which the Frontier holds out … but an almost intolerable anxiety. Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience – the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship – that killed everyone else.”
But Doig's visions are updated: Today, it's not the snowstorm or the sinking ship that's killing everyone else, but the murky pond behind the row of one-storey buildings on the service road. In a Lawren Harris painting, the little buildings were awkward intruders. In a Peter Doig, they are our heroes, holding out a distant hope of rescue from the tyranny of nature. “I have made relatively few straight landscapes that didn't have any architecture,” he once said, “and I always wanted a landscape to be humanized by a person or a building, at least something that suggests habitation.” Without that rainbow-stencilled underpass, it would all be leafy hell.
Peter Doig runs at Tate Britain in London until April 27, after which the exhibition travels to Paris and Frankfurt, Germany.
