Peter Doig Quotes

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.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

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.

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

I constantly have to negotiate with my doubts.

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

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

I would never finish a painting if I didnt have a deadline.

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.

If you are someone like Jeff Koons, and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn't make painting any easier.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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