Two Palms is pleased to debut Peter Doig’s Morning, Paramin, marking a rare dialogue between poetry and printmaking, between painter and poet, island and mountain. The series of 28 etchings—18 of which were shown at the Courtauld Gallery in London in 2023—emerged from Doig’s longstanding friendship and creative collaboration with the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Their exchange began when Walcott wrote poems in response to Doig’s paintings for the 2016 book also titled Morning, Paramin, a luminous conversation between two artists bound by the landscapes of Trinidad and the legacies of exile. Doig’s etchings complete the circle: visual meditations on Walcott’s poems that themselves had looked at Doig’s images.
Made between 2016 and 2025, these etchings traverse geographies and histories—Trinidadian beaches, Alpine valleys, fragments of European art, and the ghost of the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who, like both artists, was shaped by the Caribbean. Pissarro’s dual identity as a Caribbean-born painter of modern France serves as a shared touchstone, linking Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound, his poetic biography of Pissarro, with Doig’s own reflections on painting, migration, and belonging. In Doig’s prints, Pissarro’s legacy surfaces not as homage but as a connective thread, joining island light with European lineage.
Peter Doig is a remarkably skilled etcher, known for his meticulous process of working and reworking the plate—building, effacing, and rediscovering the image. Through this alchemical labor, he distills the painterly atmosphere of his canvases into luminous, tactile etchings. In these works, figures drift through dreamlike terrain—mountain peaks recall Zermatt’s cold brilliance; Trinidadian valleys hum with humid vegetation and memory. The imagery fuses two climates, the northern and the tropical, mirroring the dual heritages of both men: Walcott’s Caribbean and cosmopolitan sensibility, and Doig’s oscillation between Canada, London, and Trinidad. The Alpine scenes evoke remoteness and introspection; the island ones, immersion and immediacy. Together, they chart a poetics of displacement and return.
In one etching, Doig depicts Walcott himself painting, a tender inversion of their exchange: the poet becomes the image-maker. Throughout the series, Walcott’s presence hovers—sometimes as likeness, sometimes as atmosphere. These prints are not illustrations but re-imaginings, turning Walcott’s metaphors back into form and light. As Doig has said, etching is “alchemical,” a process of transformation through pressure and chance; here, it becomes a medium for friendship and remembrance.
Morning, Paramin stands as a tribute to creative reciprocity and to the enduring power of dialogue across mediums. In their crossing of poem and image, Caribbean and Alpine, memory and place, Doig’s prints become both homage and afterimage—an art of looking, reading, and re-seeing.
These works will be debuted in the Two Palms booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, Dec 3 - 7, 2025.