Humanity, clarity and warmth: Alice Neel, at the Barbican Art Gallery, reviewed

If you want to be taken seriously as a contemporary painter, paint big. ‘Blotter’, the picture that won the 34-year-old Peter Doig the John Moores Painting Prize in 1993, was over 8ft x 7ft. The pictures in his current show at the Courtauld are so big that only 12 of them fit in the gallery space.

‘Blotter’ was a dreamlike image based on a photo of the artist’s brother standing on a frozen lake in Canada, where Doig spent most of his childhood. Its title referred partly to his technique of letting the paint soak into unprimed canvas, partly to the way a single figure is absorbed into a landscape. Close in mood to Friedrich and in treatment to Munch, it marked out the Edinburgh-born artist as a contemporary master of atmospheric painterly effects.

The works in this new show were painted before and after Doig’s recent move back to London from Trinidad, where he spent his early childhood and has been based for the past 20 years.