Peter Doig (born 1959 in Edinburgh) moved to Trinidad at three, then to Canada, before studying art in London at Wimbledon, St Martins, and Chelsea — a peripatetic childhood that became the engine of his mature work. His paintings do not depict remembered places so much as reconstruct the unreliable process of remembering them: architecture, water, and figures rendered through layers of thinned paint that leave the image perpetually on the verge of dissolving. White Canoe (1990–91), his best-known painting, demonstrates the method directly — built from a half-remembered film still, the closing scene of the horror movie Friday the 13th, its violence dissolved into something closer to reverie.

His 1994 Turner Prize nomination arrived early in a career that would prioritise atmosphere and psychological depth over the conceptual strategies dominant among his British contemporaries. He was, by design, out of step with the YBAs around him — a painter's painter in a moment that largely wasn't interested in painting. That position has proven durable: the Tate Britain retrospective of 2008 confirmed the longer arc, and major surveys have followed at the Scottish National Gallery (2013), Fondation Beyeler (2015), and the Courtauld Gallery (2023).

Peter Doig lived and worked in Trinidad from 2002 to 2021, a period that decisively reshaped his palette and subject matter, before relocating his studio to London. Throughout, he has drawn on found photographs, film stills, and personal memory as raw material — sources he transforms rather than illustrates, producing an ambiguity between the real and the imagined that has become the defining condition of his work.

White Canoe (1990–91) established the motif — a lone canoe adrift on dark water — that would recur across his career and become closely associated with his name. When it sold for $11.3 million in 2007, it set a record at the time for the highest auction price achieved by a living European artist, an early signal of the critical and commercial weight his painting would come to carry.

Swamped (1990) remains his auction record, selling for $39.86 million at Christie's New York in 2021. A canoe seen from above, dissolving into reflected water and vegetation, it distils the vertiginous uncertainty of space that defines his strongest paintings — the viewer's position, like the canoe's, never quite fixed.

Morning, Paramin — a suite of 28 etchings made between 2016 and 2025 — occupies a distinct place in his output: a visual dialogue with his late friend, the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, whose poems had responded to Doig's paintings a decade earlier. Made across Trinidad and the Alps, the series folds Doig's printmaking practice directly into a decades-long creative friendship, and stands as one of his most sustained bodies of work on paper.

For Peter Doig, etching is not secondary to painting — it runs parallel, a distinct site of experimentation with its own discipline. He reworks the plate obsessively, building, effacing, and rediscovering the image through aquatint, spitbite, sugar lift, and burnishing, chasing a fluidity that approaches the alchemy of paint itself. Since relocating his studio to London in 2021, printmaking equipment has remained central to his practice as an artist, not peripheral.

His major print series read as sustained investigations rather than incidental output: Ten Etchings (1996), Blizzard '77 (1997), the Zermatt etchings made during residencies in the Swiss Alps, and Morning, Paramin, his collaboration with Derek Walcott. Limited edition prints account for a substantial share of Doig's artworks sold at auction — evidence that collectors treat Peter Doig prints as a serious body of work in their own right, not affordable substitutes for the paintings.

For collectors, Peter Doig's prints and editions offer direct access to a working method inseparable from his paintings, at a considerably more accessible price point. Artworks are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Musée d'Orsay.