Comme Ca Art presents

Maxwell Doig at The Lowry Hotel

Part of ArtMap Manchester 2008

August and September 2008

En plongee, the French Nouvelle Vague film-makers called it: that shot, so characteristic of the New Wave, taken from directly above, at once intimate, almost voyeuristic, an analytical, detached.  There is something intensely cinematic about it, or so one thinks. But why should it be? admittedly it is easier for a camera on a boom to get right above it's apparent subject and look down, in mercy or not as the case may be, than for a painter to suspend himself, plus easel, in the same sort of position.  But difficulties are there to be overcome, it is surprising that hardly any painter except Maxwell Doig has been moved to solve this particular problem.

But then, Doig has a highly distinctive vision, and obviously anything it requires of him for it's fullest expression, he will do.  His paintings, from whatever angle, are approached in a variety of ways, including sketching from the life just as any Old Master would have done, and the taking of multiple photographs.  In effect the photographs are used only as an extension of the sketchbook; the finished paintings are based on an amalgam of several photographs, supplemented and, as it were, corrected by reference to the drawings.

This is what gives Doig's paintings there life and flexibility.  basing a painting with slavish closeness on just one photograph results, even disregarding the distortions inherent in adopting the camera's way of looking, in an oddly frozen deadened effect. That may be exactly what some painters want.  But not Doig.  He is interested in the life of his subjects, without dissipating their mystery.  Consequently, when he catches them "unawares" from above their faces are never wholly visible, and often not even partially.  They where hats against the midday sun, or turn their faces towards the dark, where the painters eye can readily follow them.

The art of Maxwell Doig is immediately recognisable as his, not only because of his very individual deployment of various painterly techniques, but also, primarily indeed, because of his distinctive vision. Such skill in purely representational painting is rare indeed these days, but one does not win the Villiers David Prize, as Doig did in 1997, for skill alone.  What makes Doig stand out, then and now is his vision   of life itself.  As he puts it, "In an age when everything is moving so fast, I'm interested in portraying stillness and quiet". And who, in the light of Vermeer and Hammershoi, can argue with that?

John Russell Taylor, 2006

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