Among the earliest of Peter Doig’s celebrated cabin paintings, Hill Houses (Green Version) (1991) announces the artist as an architect of dreamlike terrains – landscapes conditioned by memory, geography and the vicissitudes of time. Embodying Doig’s methodology, the work introduces one of his signature motifs: a cabin partially veiled by trees, its presence submerged in pools of saturated colour and screened by thickets of painterly abstraction. Often beginning with documentary photographs, postcards and printed ephemera, he subjects these readymade sources to an extended process of painterly transformation, rendering fertile, indeterminate territories shaped by the porous convergence of the real, the remembered and the imagined.

Painted the same year he received the prestigious Whitechapel Artist Award, Hill Houses (Green Version) is one of a small group of works Doig created in London, inspired by a photograph of hillside houses in Maine – an image that, for the artist, conjured a landscape from his Quebecois childhood, known as Iron Hill. Traversing multiple geographies and refracted through the artist’s memory, Doig’s various iterations of the scene – many of which now reside in museum collections, including the British Council Collection, UK, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada – eschew traditional perspective and gradually unmoor themselves from their photographic source, allowing factual representation to yield to the poetics of atmosphere. ‘I want it to be more of an imaginary place’, Doig remarked of this group of paintings, ‘a place that’s somehow a wilderness’ (quoted in Gareth Jones, ‘Weird Places, Strange Folk’, Frieze, Issue 6, September 1992).

As the eye navigates the phantasmagorical terrain of Hill Houses (Green Version), it negotiates a series of perceptual shifts, oscillating between the landscape’s ambiguous topographical cues and the agitated textures of Doig’s brushwork, sprays and glazes. The dark rectangular forms of the cabin’s windows, uncannily registering human absence, reverberate across the canvas in vertical echoes: resolving into the silhouetted trunk of a leafless tree, a stark telegraph line, and a procession of mirage-like strokes on the right-hand side of the composition, which allude to a passage in related works depicting a receding road illuminated by travelling lights. In contrast to its sister paintings, Hill Houses (Green Version) is distinguished by its brooding palette, the tactile variety of its surface and an abstractive density reminiscent of the accumulated strata and dragged pigment fields characteristic of Gerhard Richter.

Conceived within a painterly tradition that is both introspective and referential, Hill Houses (Green Version) exemplifies Doig’s recursive tendency to rework scenes and motifs, prefiguring his seminal ‘Concrete Cabin’ series. Initiated in 1991 and developed throughout the decade, Doig shifted his focus from traditional wood cabins to a series of semi-abstract reinterpretations of Le Corbusier’s modernist landmark, the Unité d’Habitation in Briey-en-Forêt, France. As curator Judith Nesbitt observes, Doig’s paintings ‘might be ordinary enough places in many respects, but an odd quiescence hangs over them – not calm, but dead stillness, with an undertow of disturbance. Viewing his paintings […] we find ourselves circling across different terrains and domains, where locations and situations seem to recur, at once familiar and strange’ (Peter Doig, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2008, p.9).