It used to be seen as bad luck if Charles Saatchi unloaded your work. Sandro Chia's career famously crashed after Saatchi's divestment. But in the last year, since Sotheby's reportedly bought seven of his paintings from Saatchi for $11 million, the painter Peter Doig's market ascent has been meteoric.

Among the works Saatchi reportedly sold to Sotheby's last year was White Canoe (1990-91), an eerie Munch-ish scenario inspired by the horror classic "Friday the 13th," which fetched an auction-record $11.3 million in February at Sotheby's in London. The painting was expected to sell for up to $2.4 million, a top–end estimate that would have set a record for the artist. Last month, another Saatchi–parlayed painting, The Architect's Home in the Ravine (1991), sold for $3.6 million at Sotheby's in New York, neatly doubling its $1.2/1.8 million estimate. Saatchi paid £314,650 for the work five years ago.

Born in Edinburgh, raised in Canada, educated in London, and currently living in Trinidad, the 48-year-old Doig is now "Europe's most-expensive-living artist at auction" (emphasis on the modifiers). Short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1994 and a former trustee of the Tate Gallery, Doig first attracted recognition when he won the Whitechapel Art Gallery's Artist Award in 1991, shortly after earning his Masters from the Chelsea College of Art and Design. The award culminated in a solo exhibition at Whitechapel that year for which Doig produced a number of large canvases now considered his early masterpieces.

Saatchi was turned on to Doig relatively late in the game; it wasn't until 2000 that he began to pay six–figure sums to acquire Doig's work privately and at auction. Since showing Doig in "The Triumph of Painting" exhibition at his eponymous gallery in 2005, Saatchi has moved on to collect the works of Chinese contemporary artists and neophytes from all parts of the world displayed on Your Gallery and STUART, free forums Saatchi launched on his website a year ago in the spirit of MySpace.

Evicted from London's County Hall in late 2005, Saatchi plans to open a new 50,000-square-foot gallery in Chelsea in November. In the meantime, according to this week's New Yorker, Saatchi has developed a list of forum-perused prospects that he is nearly free to begin acquiring (his self-imposed year of abstinence is soon set to expire). Apparently, he's also been preoccupied with fetching stirrups.

--KELLY DEVINE THOMAS