One recent weekday morning, the British painter Peter Doig arrived at a bonded warehouse—a cavernous brick building—about a mile south of the River Thames, but not subject to the import taxes of the United Kingdom. He buzzed through security and entered a windowless white room, where he settled in for a long day. Awaiting him were a series of etching prints that had been brought over from the United States to be signed by Doig before being put up for sale. David and Evelyn Lasry, who run the printmaking house Two Palms, in New York, and who had printed the works and brought them over, were there to assist. Thirty-two prints in editions of twenty-eight each. Eight hundred and ninety-six signatures in total. “We think four hours, maybe five,” Evelyn said.
Doig was game. He was wearing aviator-style eyeglasses, brown leather shoes, a denim work shirt, and a gray sweater with sleeves rolled up. The Lasrys’ adult son, Teddy, read out the edition numbers, eraser at the ready. Doig made conversation as he numbered and signed them with a sharp blue pencil. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty—shit! “It’s a bit like chewing gum and scratching your head at the same time,” Doig said.
The prints Doig was signing grew out of a years-long exchange with the late St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, whom Doig met in Trinidad. (Doig, who is sixty-six, is Scottish, and white, but was raised in Canada and Trinidad; his accent is unplaceable.) Walcott wrote poetry based on Doig’s paintings, and, in response, Doig made etchings inspired by Walcott’s poetry. Doig is an avid skier and a hockey fan, and often paints alpine scenes. (His painting “Ski Jacket” sold last year at auction for more than nineteen million dollars.) He was startled to find that Walcott responded to his images of Zermatt. “Maybe stupidly, I thought he’d probably write more about ones closer to his part of the world. Not so at all,” Doig said. The poet imagined Trinidad “sort of coated in snow.”
Doig paused and asked for a glass of water. “Getting there,” he said. David uncovered a print of a horse, with the silhouette of a bird in the background. “That’s Celebration,” Doig said. “She lived on a beach in this little town,” a fishing village. At certain times, the beach would be covered with baby turtles trying to reach the sea. The sky would fill with vultures trying to eat the turtles. Celebration amid chaos. Before Walcott wrote about Doig’s work, the pair visited an exhibition of Doig’s paintings in Montreal. Walcott was, by then, in a wheelchair, and Doig wheeled him through the show. “I just remember looking at the back of his head, and thinking about the brain in his head, and everything he knew,” he said. Walcott was frank. When he disliked a painting of Doig’s, he said, “It reminds me of that fraud Guston!”
David uncovered another print, of Doig’s daughter on a balcony. “Some of the plates, he’s erased so many times that they almost have holes in them,” David said. “They look like topographical terrains, but they hold ink, and all the histories of those states are within there.” Teddy read out a series of numbers, and Doig wrote them down: one over five, two over five.
Talk turned to New York. After Doig left Trinidad, he settled in London with his second wife, Parinaz Mogadassi, and their three children. (Doig has eight kids from two marriages.) For many years, he also kept a studio in New York, and would visit often. In the eighties, he would pass through the city on his way from Canada to London, using the cut-rate standby fare at J.F.K. “You’d put your name down on like five different airline lists, and you’d just wait, and you’d always get a flight,” he said. “This is all pre-9/11.”
Any plans to return? “Not really, no,” he said. The bonded warehouse had helped him avoid the trip: the works could come to him, instead of the other way around. “I think people have fear about going through the border. My wife, definitely. She’s Iranian,” he said. “So would I go on my own? That’s the question. I wouldn’t fear for myself, really, but it seems so ominous.”
David said that he had recently attended an art-world event where people who had accepted federal money were speaking in code. “They weren’t outright saying, like, ‘The Trump Administration is cancelling all these things if we say the wrong thing,’ ” he said. “So there’s a kind of climate of fear, which I’ve never experienced in my life.”
“Fear, yes,” Doig agreed.
Teddy suggested that Zohran Mamdani’s election had reënergized the city.
“New York will always survive, surely,” Doig said. “It’ll always kind of reinvent itself. Maybe it needs reinventing.” He carried on, until he mislabelled a print. “Shit!” ♦
