I’m absolutely thrilled to share with you my largest and most significant piece of art to date, the Dover Marina Hotel & Spa, unveiled at a very special event on Thursday 8th September by the Chairman of Dover District Council, Cllr Gordon Cowan.
I’m hugely proud to see my painting hanging pride of place in this wonderful and iconic building that dominates the Dover waterfront, and I believe my piece is one of the largest ‘hyperrealism’ watercolour paintings now in existence…
How it all began
It all came about from a chance conversation in June of 2022 in a small restaurant in North West Kent, between myself and Dover Marina Hotel & Spa owner, Kanagaratnam Rajaseelan (“Seelan”).
The occasion was a monthly get-together of a group of BR6 curry fans and the restaurant was Village Cuisine in Farnborough High Street. The chat would lead to an extraordinary artistic endeavour on my part, and this huge, 65 inch x 50 inch framed watercolour painting.
The magnificent Victorian building of this landmark 4-star Dover seafront hotel has stood since 1841. Like the town itself, it is steeped in history – Sir Winston Churchill once stayed there – and miraculously, it survived the bombing during the Second World War. It has a spectacular outlook facing the English Channel. It definitely deserved its portrait to be painted.
Seelan had seen limited edition prints of my paintings in The Change of Horses pub in Farnborough High Street, including this one of Marine Parade Hythe, so he asked if I would consider painting a portrait of his Dover hotel.
I specialise in hyperrealism in watercolour, painting high detailed images, with a strong emphasis on light and colour, and over the years I have painted many scenes around Kent, where I’ve lived for 40 years, including Westerham, and this view of The Great Stour at Fordwich.
The Dover Marina Hotel painting, which took up my time off and on for 14 months, was destined to be altogether different in scope and scale.
I originally planned to include Dover Castle, but at a meeting at the hotel with Seelan and his Interior Design Consultant, Nicholas Hollinshead, it became clear that there would simply not be space!
Seelan had recently purchased the entire eastern elevation of the hotel, which was being extended to become a Best Western Premier Hotel, so the portrait had to solely depict the entire hotel facade and the painting itself needed to be as big as possible.
Always up for a challenge, I readily agreed to all this, but the scale, complexity, size and weight of the finished piece was going to present very significant challenges!
In a 14-month timespan, life events were inevitably going to happen, so the painting was always going to be a slow process, particularly as I paint in intricate detail, most of the time employing a tiny paintbrush like this…!
The process
Firstly I needed excellent reference photographs, and was delighted with what Simon and Jodie from https://www.dovermediagroup.co.uk/ sent me. Very high resolution photos of all the Victorian architectural detail were going to be essential.
The next challenge was getting hold of the largest watercolour paper available in the UK (!) and then considering how my excellent framer and friend, Colin Hales, from Westerham in Kent would be able to handle the framing of so large a piece. https://oxted-framing.business.site/
Meanwhile, I started getting the initial drawing done, after working out the overall composition.
This proved to be a feat of draughtsmanship, due to the scale of the painting and the fact that some of the architectural features have been altered slightly in nearly 200 years.
That’s when the life events alluded to earlier cropped up. One was delightful, the arrival of our first grandchild in August ’22, while the second was very sad, as my 95-year-old Mum became very ill in the September and subsequently passed away. She had always followed my art closely and I’m so glad she got to enjoy seeing the progress of my most significant work to date in her last few months.
So of course the painting became delayed and was finally completed a year after the original commission conversation.
The decisions on the framing materials had been agreed between Seelan, Nick and myself, but firstly it took a trip to the Sussex studio of Rich Clark (at https://www.richclarkimages.co.uk/) for scanning, ready for prints and postcards. Again that became a mission for Rich due to its size!
However, nothing was to compare to the challenge of transporting the framed painting, now weighing 70lbs between the framer’s workshop, the artist’s home and the hotel. A van had to be hired for these trips around Kent until it was fitted (with some difficulty) to the hotel wall, ready for the unveiling.
It is now in its new residence, where it can be viewed, having been unveiled at a cocktail party event on the evening of 8th September.
People have asked me: “Is it a photograph?” and that is a great compliment!
Hyperrealism is the ultimate challenge. And this is a perfect example of what this particular form of art means to me: the process of capturing reality in ultra minute, high fidelity detail, while enhancing that reality with colour and light to produce an idealised version of reality, but where you can still tell it’s a painting – just!
If you’re in the area or fancy a trip down to Dover to see it, I hope you’ll appreciate the 800 hours or so that went into this work! I am certainly extremely proud of it.
I’m very happy to report that The Dover Marina Hotel and Spa has been named as a ‘Best Western Premier’, which puts it in the top rank of the brand’s flagship hotels nationwide. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Seelan, his vision and his wonderful team continue to develop and grow this amazing and important piece of Kent architecture, giving it life and purpose for many more generations to come.
Event Photos: Dover Media Group, Event Photos
My personal PR, Website, Etsy management etc: Sophie Martin, The Word Bird
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