Doig's Painting and Berlin

This is a painting by Scottish-born, Trinidad-based artist Peter Doig. My long, scruffy figure quivered as I stood in front of it at CFA gallery, the mid-winter morning I first set foot in Berlin, back in 2009. That day, I was at the gallery with my brother of different parents, (el) Jose, who some of you might know well. Outside everything was being gobbled up by the white.

The painting hung at CFA as part of a solo show called ‘Not For Sale’, which gathered works by the artist from German museums and international private collections. Not only it was the first day my forehead was exposed to the electric air of the German capital, it was also my very first opportunity to run riot in a room packed with Doigs.

​Both of these two events, the city and the exhibition, had a seismic effect on subsequent chapters of my life, both on a personal level and as an artist. The former -with its unique capacity for regeneration from all kinds of ghosts, and its unbeatable celebratory spirit- encouraged me to attend to my inner clock, follow my bliss, and move on from my somehow stagnant life situation in Sydney. In time, I left Australia after more than 10 years, and relocated in Europe: first in Berlin and then, permanently, in our quaint arctic corner, where I write these lines from.

The later -Peter Doig’s show- opened up new vistas in the noble exercise of sticking lumps of colour on a flat surface. The exhibition reset my intuition to ways of playing the drum kit (of painting) more fully, and with more intensity, without necessarily having to hit it harder.

Peter Doig, 'Not For Sale' exhibition at CFA gallery, Berlin (Pic CFA Berlin)​

As I said, I was living then in Sydney, with little more time and heart to offer to anything or anyone other than the caresses for my two-year-old princess, and a marriage with the acids and fumes of a lustful MA in Printmaking. At the end of 2008, I went on a visit to Europe to take my daughter to her Iberian folk... (read more)