In The Studio with Peter Doyle

Peter Doyle’s studio is tucked away on a side street near Brighton’s seafront, among the salt-faded, rainbow-coloured terraces of Kemp Town. The Irish-born painter has been based in the seaside town for just over a year now. He grew up in Dublin, and spent time moving between the Irish capital, Berlin, Paris and London, before settling down in Sussex. He’s currently deep in work for an upcoming exhibition that will open in New York, at Half Gallery Annex, in March.

When we visit, a few paintings—all in varying states of completion—are propped around the studio, pinned to walls, resting on easels, figures and faces and scenes slowly emerging from the canvas and Peter’s imagination. Doyle moves between two or three works at once, orchestrating his compositions in tandem as they develop. The paintings feel both precise and hallucinatory, and it’s this tension—between control and disorientation—that makes his work so interesting.

“I depend on chance when I’m painting. The canvas is a map that allows you to find out where you want to go.”

A recent exhibition at Rhodes Contemporary in London, titled Public House, drew on the sensory immediacy and hazy recollection of pub interiors. The paintings summon something familiar and unstable: not just specific rooms, but social spaces more broadly, and what accumulates inside them, bodies, gestures, fragments of conversations, music, history and memory.

If the work feels alive, it is alive in the way a dream feels alive, all haze and specificity. For Peter painting is a way of thinking through an idea, and traces of that thinking remain visible. “I depend on chance when I’m painting,” he begins. “I think it would be a bit boring if I had everything planned perfectly and was just getting exactly what I’m thinking onto the canvas. The canvas is a map to find where you want to go.”

The result is that Doyle’s paintings feel like being inside a scene rather than simply looking at one. Figures are central to this sensation. They often overlap, like double exposures—sometimes clearly emerging, sometimes only half-present. Faces are sometimes blurred, sometimes resolved and clear and precise. “Ultimately the paintings are about people,” he says, “but I want the work to have abstraction and atmosphere, too.”

“Rather than making the work realistic in terms of likeness or anatomy, I focus on the realism of how it feels to inhabit the moment and space the subject is in,” Doyle continues. “The mood is the structural element.”

A principle element of this atmosphere is a sense of time passing: the feeling of viewing the same scene over a period rather than from a fixed vantage. There’s often no single perspective. Figures look in different directions, silhouettes merge, blocks of colour interrupt form. People appear from within the background or dissolve back into it. As a viewer, you feel like an outsider—peering through a condensation-covered window, or catching a beam of light that only partially illuminates an interior. They are maybe trying to recall something you saw earlier, or summoning up a story.

Doyle wasn’t formally trained. He skipped art school, instead honing his practice through trial and error—learning by doing, through looking, absorbing, and moments of inspiration. He spent some time when younger doing graffiti, though that history isn’t immediately legible in the work, you could see it there, in a certain attitude and bravery.

“Rather than making the work realistic in terms of likeness or anatomy, I focus on the realism of how it feels to inhabit the moment and space the subject is in. The mood is the structural element.”

After leaving Dublin and living in Berlin, he returned to Ireland and rented a lock-up garage near Dublin’s old fruit market. His earlier paintings from this formative period were flatter and more naïve in style, often centred on a single figure within a space.

“The early works feel more like fantasy in how they were structured,” Peter recalls. “I can understand what I was trying to convey, but I didn’t have the right language or understanding yet. Looking back, there are elements I’d change or give less focus to, but it felt right at the time. I see them as stepping stones. I like that the work has developed into what I’m making now without a drastic shift.”

He’s become increasingly interested in the idea of recognising what isn’t working. “Knowing what’s bad is something I’ve been thinking about more and more,” he says. “In the past, if I was unhappy with a painting, I’d quickly paint over everything with a layer of white. I found it difficult to get rid of just what I thought was bad—everything had to go. Now I question it more. I have a better sense of what’s worth keeping.”

“When you’re making a painting, you’re constantly questioning why you’re making that line, or putting that person there, or choosing that colour. It’s such an internal back-and-forth. Sometimes you go with your gut, whether it’s the right decision or not. I have a couple of regrets,” he adds.

From Dublin, Doyle moved to London, then Paris, but feeling uninspired, he returned home. That time back in Dublin proved crucial. He began focusing on scenes with multiple figures, and friends started appearing consistently in the work for the first time. Surrounded by what he wanted to paint, something clicked.

He’s since settled in Brighton and is enjoying it. We leave the studio for a walk along the beach, before ducking into a pub when the rain comes on. The interior wouldn’t feel out of place in one of his paintings: a few drinkers, a barmaid, soft light. We’re told we’ll have to leave before long—a wake is being held in the back room.

“When you’re making a painting, you’re constantly questioning why you’re making that line, or putting that person there, or choosing that colour. It’s such an internal back-and-forth. Sometimes you go with your gut, whether it’s the right decision or not. I have a couple of regrets.”

Doyle takes photographs constantly on his phone, observing as he moves through places. These images form a loose web of references, which—through the slow, physical labour of paint on canvas—eventually coalesce into a painting.

“My way of looking can be fairly literal,” he says. “I like the feeling that the figures in the paintings could really be there in that space. Photography is a huge part of the process for me. Mostly I use images I’ve taken myself, but I’m not limited to that—magazines, books, film. Wherever it comes from, if it fits what I’m trying to show, I’ll use it.”

Pint drunk, we head out into Brighton’s evening, the Palace Pier and Pavillion lit up, conversation drifts back to the upcoming exhibition, he’s going back to the studio to continue working.

“I'm not giving the show a theme per se, with my new works I’m trying to develop and sharpen what I have been doing for the last year or so,” he says. “I want to take that work and push it as much as I can.”