Size: 276 x 201 cm

Medium - Oil on canvas

Orange Sunshine is set in between seasons, Winter transitioning into Spring. The painting depicts a landscape scene of trees and mountains. "I often use heightened colors to create a sense of the experience or mood or feeling of being there... We have all seen incredible sunsets. We've all experienced the sensation of light dropping and producing strange natural effects and I think in a way I am using these natural phenomena and amplifying them through the materiality of paint and the activity of painting. When I was making the 'snow' paintings I was looking at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of color." The artist cited. In this painting, a cluster of tall red pines stands against a vivid orange sky flecked with iridescent flakes of falling snow. Standing before the painting, one is struck by the surrounding of the mountain landscape.

The stillness of the untamed mountain idyll is broken by the silhouetted form of a snowboarder, mid tail-grab picked out against the dazzling sun in the upper center of the composition. This subverts the notion of the insignificance of man before untamed nature. The painting's surface, built up of layer upon layer of pigment is at times translucent, the oils seep and bleed into one another, at times running down the canvas in serendipitous arabesques. Elsewhere the surface positively glistens, as in the sky where flecks of white paint create a snowstorm that draw our eye back to the picture's surface.

The artist, Peter Doig is Scottish born, who as a child moved to Canada where he grew up. His works are often rendered from a photograph, yet he does not replicate the image and is described as possessing of a magical realism. Through this painting, Doig fuses techniques studied from art history with overtly contemporary images, mining the rich seam between painting and photography, between the popular and the sublime. Doig is primarily an imagistic painter and works from a visual archive of pictures and photographs culled from newspapers, postcards, film and album covers.

Manesha Peiris (2022)