Peter Doig Quotes

#1. A photo is like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want ... I'm not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.

Peter Doig

#2. I would never finish a painting if I didn't have a deadline.

Peter Doig

#3. I don't think money can help you become a better painter, for sure. You can have all the studios you want; it won't help you make a better painting.

Peter Doig

#4. I also learned that you are affected by your environment, even if you try not to be. Color, light that is, matters because you want to do justice to it and also you get excited by it.

Peter Doig

#5. I do feel Scottish in some way. Maybe it's to do with visiting my grandparents here every summer as a child, but I am aware of my Scottish ancestry. It's there all right, but it would be pushing it to label me a Scottish painter. Or, indeed, an anywhere painter.

Peter Doig

#6. There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don't know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It's only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.

Paul Auster

#7. I sometimes wish I had never had to sell a painting. Every painting you make represents the time it was made and how you were feeling and what your influences were ... You are never going to feel that way again, so you can never repeat it ...

Peter Doig

#8. Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.

E.L. Doctorow

#9. I love Trinidad and I love living there, but it's quite harsh.

Peter Doig

#10. Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

Peter Doig

#11. I'm not one of those artists having people there lying around on their paintings, you know, like Hockney or whoever.

Peter Doig

#12. It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

Peter Doig

#13. Failure is ... the highway to success.

Og Mandino

#14. What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

Peter Doig

#15. The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.

Walter Isaacson

#16. I constantly have to negotiate with my doubts.

Peter Doig

#17. There could be a hundred paintings in every one painting, depending on when you stop.

Peter Doig

#18. Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I've only seen that one HBO special he did. He's one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff.

Tom Lehrer

#19. I think if I was Trinidadian, I would latch more on to the myths and romanticise the place more. I don't think it's my place to do that - they're not really mine. I'm an outsider.

Peter Doig

#20. Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

Peter Doig

#21. You don't need Mom and Dad's permission to take charge of your own life. Find something you want to do, and don't give up on it. You can start tomorrow.

Lisa Kleypas

#22. It's still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don't think I would do it otherwise.

Peter Doig

#23. When I was younger, I remember thinking, 'I have to pass this mark' or 'I have to get this role' or 'I have to do this or that' and then that will mean I have accomplished something. But life is actually all about the process and not about the goals.

Jane Seymour

#24. Painting doesn't have a function, not in the way that music or film does ... I mean, you can dance to music. Music can be used for a soundtrack, so it has a function in that sense, beyond itself. But painting doesn't ... But I do believe that painting has a purpose.

Peter Doig

#25. How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.

Peter Doig

#26. As an artist, you are aware there is this strange money market out there, but you have no sense of how it works.

Peter Doig

#27. When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.

Peter Doig

#28. I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.

Peter Doig

#29. You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

Peter Doig

#30. I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

Peter Doig