Peter Doig is the highest-selling living British artist. And Canadian, sort of

Trinidad-based artist Peter Doig set a sales record this May when Swamped, a painting of his from 1990 that alludes to both the climactic scene from the horror film Friday the 13th and the death by drowning of Group of Seven painter Tom Thompson, was sold at a Christie's auction for $26-million (U.S.). According to news reports, this made him the highest selling living British artist of the moment. Last year his painting of a rainbow-decorated tunnel familiar to anyone who has driven Toronto's Don Valley Parkway set the record. The year before, it was his painting of Eaton Centre architect Eb Zeidler's home in Toronto's upscale Rosedale neighbourhood. In each case he was celebrated as a British or European artist, but the nationality of his most valuable paintings has a lot more to do with our home and native land.

Changing studios, changing temperatures, changing humidity — all these things affect paintings, but you don't really realize it until you move.

Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Doig spent his formative years growing up in Canada. He moved to England in his twenties to study painting, but the breakthrough work he created in London was inspired by his memories and the natural imagery of Ontario. He is quick to distance himself from our national art history and only admits to sharing with the Group of Seven a sympathy for American and European artists like Whistler and Munch, but when prodded will acknowledge his artistic roots.

"The effect of a place is not necessarily immediate," he tells me over the phone from a stopover in London on his way home from Düsseldorf where he teaches at the Fine Arts Academy. "Sometimes it takes some time. Sometimes it takes some distance. In the case of my so-called Canadian paintings, it wasn't until I left Canada that they started happening."

These paintings effectively blur the line between representation and abstraction by magnifying the atmospheric effects of melting snow or emphasizing the Jackson Pollock-like web of branches in a forest. Nature is portrayed not as an idyllic harmony, but a chaotic complexity contrasted with humanity in the form of modern architecture or ambiguous figures – often in canoes – who aren't clearly on one side or the other of that divide.

There is a definite Northern sensibility to these early works that has disappeared now that he calls Trinidad home. For a painter so tied to landscape, moving studios from England to the Caribbean had an inevitable effect.

"Changing studios, changing temperatures, changing humidity, all these things affect paintings, but you don't really realize it until you move. Travelling from the atmosphere in London to one where it's much more humid, the canvas itself behaves in a very different way."

His recent works are currently on view at the Palazzetto Tito in Venice and, while they maintain his psychedelic colour scheme and fascination with subtly surreal scenarios, the influence of his new home is unmistakable. "The colour combinations I've seen in Trinidad have influenced me. The palette becomes brighter. The picture plane becomes less fractured, less muted."

Whether these works will one day fetch the same high prices as his Canadian landscapes is a question, like the matter of his nationality, that the artist does his best to dodge.

"It all remains quite abstract to me really," he says as our conversation ends, "and I try to keep it that way because it's not really my world. That's another Peter Doig."

Peter Doig's work is being exhibited at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito in Venice, Italy through October 4, 2015, and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark until August 16, 2015.