My Favourite Painting: Piet Oudolf

Piet Oudolf chooses 100 Years Ago (Carrera)

'What impresses me in Peter Doig’s paintings are the immersive landscapes and colours. The rich compositions are always more than what you see on first sight, figures often look isolated in their context and the colours remind me of Gauguin.

‘I am drawn to this particular painting because you can feel that the person in the boat is very much on his own. One cannot sense whether he is far out on the ocean or closer to shore, or what he may be watching or feeling in that moment as he stares towards the beach.’

Piet Oudolf is a garden designer

John McEwen on 100 Years Ago (Carrera)

Peter Doig is one of the most successful living artists, renowned for his imaginative figurative works. ‘All the paintings have an element of autobiography in them,’ he has said, ‘but I resist making the autobiographical readings overly specific.’

He was born in Edinburgh, but his Scots father’s shipping-accountancy job took the family abroad – he spent his childhood in Trinidad and his boyhood in Canada.

‘To get away’, Mr Doig went to London to learn art, concluding in 1990 with a masters degree from Chelsea School of Art, where he experienced an ‘epiphany: I started making paintings influenced by artists I’d admired… people like Hopper and Munch’.

In 2000, an art residency took him back to Trinidad, where he returned in 2002 and has lived ever since.

Mr Doig regards his art as ‘filmic’. He explains: ‘I like the idea that the pictures might be films and the viewer could become the director.’ The title of this one refers to the arrival of cinema in Trinidad a century before it was painted. As is his wont, the references are of a complex variety. Carrera is the Trinidadian island shown, although the bold coloured divisions are more abstract than naturalistic. The canoe, which appears in several paintings of this period, recalls Canada. The painting was inspired in part by an image of the Allman Brothers Band on the inside gatefold of the record An Anthology by Duane Allman, with the figure being based on American bassist Berry Oakley, a founding member of the band.

An exhibition of Mr Doig’s new paintings is at Michael Werner Gallery, 22, Upper Brook Street, London W1, until November 16.

A Hampshire farm with immaculate farmhouse and a huge entertaining barn, just a few miles down the road from Country Life

A sprawling house with a pair of gardens designed by some of the most brilliant minds in modern horticulture is

Scampston Hall: The early work of a master garden designer, still shining bright after two decades

Piet Oudolf was still up and coming when he was commissioned to create a garden at Scampston Hall in North

Credit: Bridgeman Images

My favourite painting: Mark Price

'The picture reminds me of her: I swear she is an angel.'

Credit: The Kiss - Gustav Klimt

My favourite painting: Danielle Steel

Danielle Steel, the world's top-selling fiction writer, admits that 'Klimt stole my heart' with this wonderful work.

Credit: Courtesy of the artist’s estate/Alan Cristea Gallery

My favourite painting: Roger Wright

'Its typically powerful brushstrokes and juxtaposed gorgeous colours give a heart warming and evocative sense of fun and nostalgia'

My favourite painting: Jenny Uglow

'This is a tribute to the dignity and inner lives of “ordinary” people, profound and tender at once.'

My favourite painting: David Starkey

David Starkey shares the one painting he would own, if he could

My favourite painting: Nicholas Coleridge

Nicholas Coleridge chooses Maharana Jagat Singh attending an elephant fight by Syaji and Sukha as his favourite painting

My favourite painting: Jacqueline Wilson

'I looked at this painting and decided to write about a Victorian circus girl one day'