The Sound of Drums on the Surface of an Ocean:

Music and the Art of Peter Doig

Patti Smith Group, “Ain’t It Strange”

Lady B, “To the Beat Y’All”

Neil Young, “Revolution Blues”

The Kinks, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone”

Funky 4 + 1, “That’s the Joint”

Steely Dan, “Peg”

Howlin’ Wolf, “Moanin’ for My Baby”

Iggy and the Stooges, “I’m Sick of You”

—Peter Doig, Desert Island Discs selections made as part of the exhibition Imprint 93/City Racing, City Racing, London, 1995

Mighty Sparrow, “Dan is the Man in the Van”

Bob Dylan, “All the Tired Horses”

Hank Williams, “Honky Tonkin’”

Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Want Fi Goh Rave”

Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “The Message”

Aretha Franklin, “Jump to It”

Kraftwerk, “Computer Love”

Shadow, “Way, Way Out”

—Desert Island Discs: Peter Doig, BBC Radio 4, July 14, 2023

Turn us loose, we shall overcome. They say: “Where you get that bass from?” In 1990, when rapper Chuck D thrust these lines through the frenetic instrumentals of “Power to the People,” his hip-hop group Public Enemy were unavoidable, all-conquering, undeniable. For their third studio album, Fear of a Black Planet (1990), Public Enemy’s producers—Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, and “Carl Ryder” (Chuck D’s production nom de plume), collectively termed the Bomb Squad—had sought to further fortify the sample-heavy “wall of noise” that had been established on the group’s previous record, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). The result was a breathless rally of fragments, polyrhythms, and (re)processed sounds that provided the raucous backdrop for a strikingly sincere message of humanism and rage. It was a war cry, a rebuttal, an investment in people when people felt emptied of worth. It was, as the music writer Edna Gundersen wrote at the time, “a masterpiece.”¹

Fear of a Black Planet featured, by Chuck D’s estimation, “about 150, maybe 200 samples.”² In the 1980s there were few constraints on what artists could incorporate into their own songs, and to what extent. The result was a raft of experimental, open-eyed albums that borrowed from culture in order to give back to it, and did so in a way that was surprising, accessible, communal. A part of you, a part of me, an idea of what “us” could sound like. At just 3:48 minutes, “Power to the People” featured the work of Isaac Hayes (“Theme from Shaft,” 1971), Sly & the Family Stone (“Turn Me Loose,” 1967), the Time (“Wild and Loose,” 1982), Trouble Funk (“Drop the Bomb,” 1982), and James Brown (“Soul Power [Live],” 1971), among, somehow, others. It was released, as copyright lawyers Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola noted, during the “golden age of sampling”—but where there is gold, there follows a rush.³ In 1991, the court case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records Inc. led to the criminalization of unlicensed sampling. In a 2010 paper, McLeod and DiCola calculated that, were Fear of a Black Planet released at the time of their writing, the samples would have cost over $6 million, leading to a loss of at least $5 per record sold and a total loss of $5 million.⁴

Chuck D once said that “we,” meaning the Bomb Squad, “approached every record like it was a painting.”⁵ Peter Doig, speaking on an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs program in 2023, responded in kind. Reminiscing about his first introduction to “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, another hip-hop group whose sound was characterized by the isolation, reconstruction, and incorporation of preexisting songs, the Trinidad-based artist said, “I’d never really heard anything like it. . . . At the time, it really changed the way that I thought about making paintings, making art, collaging, and taking photographs.”⁶ Within the musical processes of sampling, looping, and mixing, of building out and up through multiple layers, both Doig and Chuck D identified a uniquely painterly methodology (nay, sensitivity). Not one that was overly beholden to a singular doctrine of origination, aggregation, or referentiality but one that was free to borrow from each of these seemingly oppositional strategies in service of a cohesive yet intentionally fragmentary whole. To reconsider, to rework, to remix. Doig continued: “It gave me a liberty that I didn’t have before.”⁷

When we sample, things alter while remaining the same. Dependent on their newfound surroundings, samples can be intensified, diminished, undercut. They can be reset, offset, placed in a brand-new body. (The Bill Withers of “Grandma’s Hands,” 1971, is not the Bill Withers of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity,” 1996.) But the metamorphosis can never be complete: samples will always carry within them the evidence of their former life; they will retain an essence. When Doig samples in his paintings, when he assembles a variety of sources onto a single canvas, he does not bring virgin images of his own ideation alone; he brings a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington, a photograph of film star Robert Mitchum or painter Franklin Carmichael, an image of a Japanese ski resort reproduced in a Canadian newspaper. He brings rearticulations of photographs, postcards, album covers, architectures, and artworks (his own and those of others) that have lived full lives in various elsewheres; that have accrued their own aesthetics, connotations, associations; that have retained an essence. Which is not to say that Doig’s source material is recognizable. The Edwardian postcard of a German pier that built the architecture of Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre (2000/2002) is not a household image. The lone figure at the center of the 100 Years Ago (2000–2001) paintings is, but in Doig’s treatment is assuredly not, a member of the Allman Brothers. But the coexistence of these multiple sources within Doig’s compositions creates a muted yet discernible lack of ease, one that the artist smooths—with his mark-making, his chromatic dexterity, his ability to list from representation to abstraction and back again—but does not obscure. (Look at Music [2 Trees], 2019, and watch as the players pass between brushwork and erasure; look at Painting on a Wall, 2008, and tell me if you see the same couch that I see.) The outcome is akin to a story told in multiple accents: legible, always, but reluctant to fully relinquish itself to a dominant voice. Restless, resistant, just a little bit off.

Samples breathe fresh energy into bygone cultural offerings: they bring life to death and vice versa. Sister Nancy keeps pace with Lauryn Hill. Lou Reed rubs shoulders with A Tribe Called Quest. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor is introduced to generation upon unsuspecting generation by way of Celine Dion’s “All By Myself.” It is a process of reanimation that shows culture to be self-referential, self-exploratory, and ultimately self-perpetuating, an entity that feeds on itself to feed itself and ensure its continual evolution. (It is self-reliant, as we should remember.) Doig’s variations on a compositional, conceptual theme can span years. In a series of formally consistent paintings completed between 2012 and 2019, which will be central to his upcoming exhibition House of Music at Serpentine, London, a lion roams the vacant streets of Trinidad. Its bulk is undeniable; its mane, wreathlike; its fur is told through heated streaks of luminous gold; but the lowness of its shoulders belies the fatigue of a creature condemned to prowl the same street for eternity. Doig’s lion is an amalgam of photographs taken at the Emperor Valley Zoo in Port of Spain and of the Rastafarian emblem of the biblical Lion of Judah, ever present on T-shirts, flags, and walls throughout Trinidad. In Doig’s telling, the lion stalks the perimeter of the notorious Port of Spain Prison (formerly the Royal Gaol), which was built by the British in 1812 as a detention center. As a 2014 paper on the Trinidad and Tobago incarceration system noted, “the foreboding exterior . . . reflected the moral architecture that dominated the period. No rehabilitative services were provided and inmates worked continuously albeit not gainfully.”⁸ The walls are the color of buttercups.

The Port of Spain Prison is located in the heart of the city for which it is named. Its walls are the walls of a public road; its confinement begins where freedom ends. “In the cells you are very aware of the streets,” Doig said in 2015. “I began to think about what it must be like to be in there where you can hear the city and especially at Carnival time, when you can hear the music and revelry but you’re locked away.”⁹ A life denied life, articulated through the haunting removal of figures and the solitary presence of a lion, a creature all too familiar with the mechanisms and machinations of steel bars. But as is typical of Doig’s work, not to mention the world of lived experience that it draws from, meaning is multiplicitous. Despite the contextual gravity suggested by the habitual repetition among these pictures, despite their austere silence, despite their wordless condemnations of systems of control, colonial subjugation, and carceral injustice, one cannot deny that their palette conjures images of the burgeoning petals of Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers, the dreamlike serenity of Giorgio de Chirico’s plazas, the life-affirming tricolor of the Rastafari. And one cannot overlook that, in Rastafari culture, the lion is symbolic of the divine power of Haile Selassie, connoting strength, prosperity, hope. And one must not ignore the distant, unmoving presence of the St. Vincent Jetty Lighthouse, which provides safe passage for all who pass below. “It’s certainly no Garden of Eden,” Doig said in 2013 of his compositional duality, triality, quadrality, abundance. “Then again you don’t want it to be like a toxic wasteland either.”¹⁰

Why do we return? Why do we repeat? Why are we compelled to produce variations on themes when those themes have long since been established? Because there is more to say. Because there are different ways to say it. Or, because a spirit has yet to be put to rest. The foundational composition of Doig’s lion series is consistent (prison, road, beast; repeat), but among the individual paintings we find fluctuations in intensity and in architecture, in the arrangements and articulations of their constituent parts, in energy. In Lion in the Road (Sailors) (2019), our lion is lifted on a plinth as the city falls to geometry. In Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak) (2015), a lone specter navigates our familiar street, the ghost of a soul imprisoned or the hope of eventual release. Whenever Doig fixates on a figure, a landscape, or an abstract effect to such an extent that he rearticulates it over, over, over once again, it’s as if he were trying to escape. It’s as if he were exercising painterly license as a means by which to exorcise a something—although the true nature of that something will forever remain hidden from our view. Perhaps it is a lingering memory, an irresolvable thought, an emotional response to the world that was felt, felt for a moment, and then lost. Perhaps it is what he hopes to feel. “The process often becomes just as important as the source,” Doig has said.¹¹ That there remains an ambiguity over whether that “process” is painterly or otherwise feels apt.

Doig’s life has been performed with musical accompaniment; House of Music will pay tribute to its enduring influence. In 1979, at the age of twenty, he enrolled in art school in London in no small part because of his fondness for the postpunk scene and his aspirations to design record covers. While studying, he began working as a dresser for the English National Opera, a job he held for seven years. (The Napoleonic figures that would emerge in the Gasthof paintings some twenty years later originate in a photograph of Doig and a friend dressed in the costumes used for a staging of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka, 1911. During the final performance, the pair snuck onstage alongside the cast and were promptly relieved of their duties.) In 1998, Doig’s enviable collection of CDs, twelve- and seven-inch vinyl, and cassettes was indexed in the catalogue for his exhibition Blizzard seventy-seven at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Unsurprisingly, his paintings have come to incorporate carnival scenes (representative and impressionistic), dancers (nude and clothed), musicians (known and anonymous), and hulking speaker stacks set down in pastoral scenes like invasive monoliths or Minimalist voids void of reference. (At the Paris showcase for Doig’s collaboration with Dior in 2021, the catwalk was lined by vast rusting sound systems.) The frontage of Music Shop (2023) is haunted by the enigmatic figure of the late Winston Bailey, a calypso singer appropriately known as Mighty Shadow, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and a floor-length cape daubed with a luminescent ribcage. The scene, conventional in all aspects but the manifestation of death at its center, is cleaved by the exterior windows of the store, which seem to look directly onto the Caribbean Sea. This subtle compositional tweak, equivalent examples of which can be found throughout Doig’s House of Pictures series, disrupts the verisimilitude suggested elsewhere in the painting, thus doffing a figurative cap to the complexities of picture-making itself. Artworks allow us to remember, to recollect, but their inherent failing, which is at the same time their beauty, is that they are condemned to forever be artworks alone: they cannot, will not, should not, resurrect. (“MUSIC EQUIPMENT LIMITED,” reads the facade within Music Shop. So too art, my friend.)

“Melody, harmony, music is the atmosphere,” sings Mighty Shadow in “Dingolay” (1988), “sweet music is everywhere.” Even when Doig’s visual allusions to music are not explicit, one would be forgiven for defining his paintings as assuredly “musical”—which is to say, ambient, ambiguous, accommodating of multiple interpretations. Like songs without words, they are works that establish a timbre, a texture, and a tone, yet are unwilling to overdefine themselves. (“The detail of a leaf does not really interest me,” notes Doig, “but getting across the feeling that what one is looking at may be a leaf does.”)¹² As such, they remain open to the individual projections of their viewers, acting as repositories or receptacles for our hopes, fears, histories, fancies, fantasies, or whatever else we feel compelled to relinquish ourselves of. They are, or play the part of, reservoirs. “I’m trying to make something that’s constantly evolving into another image,” Doig says. “Great painting does achieve that, really, or great songwriting, or whatever it may be. Music. Not everyone listens to the same piece of music and it sounds the same, or affects the same emotion. Sometimes you may want to cry; sometimes you may want to laugh.”¹³ To view a painting by Doig is not to view the same painting as another, but to be granted a foundation upon which to overlay an inner landscape that is unique to oneself and oneself only. Your painting is not my painting. My painting is not yours. My world will remain my own. You see a downpour; I see a sky full of romance. You see a seascape; I see the sound of drums on the surface of an ocean. You see a snowstorm; I see the stubbornness of my father and I miss him.

Sharing music is a generous but revealing act. To share in such a way is to open oneself up to the prospect of recognition, of closeness and a connection strengthened, but it also necessitates a momentary unmasking of oneself that may well amount in rejection—rejection of a fragment that becomes representative of the whole. (As Neal Brown wrote of the inclusion of Doig’s record collection in the Whitechapel catalogue, “Making these lists is an exposure of aesthetic sensibility that both makes vulnerable and securely bonds the compiler within the safe codes of a sub-group.”)¹⁴ This gesture, which will be performed as part of House of Music by the revolving cast of musicians who will curate the exhibition’s soundtrack, feels akin to Doig’s painterly process. Doig has said that the often solitary figure in his works acts as “a cypher to draw the viewer into the painting”: an always shifting Rückenfigur onto which we can cast ourselves, through which we can consider ourselves.¹⁵ I would propose that the figure is simultaneously a stand-in for the painter himself, endlessly wandering the many-layered, always melting landscapes of his own imagining, his own recollection, his own assembly, in an attempt to comprehend the power that those very landscapes continue to hold over him. Their gravity, unwavering. It’s as if Doig were pulling records from his personal archive, plugging a jack into the 1950s speaker system that occupies a wall of his studio in Port of Spain, and asking whether we, too, can find ourselves in the music. If so, what do you look like? What do you feel like? A downpour, a seascape, a snowstorm. How does our world sound to you?