Butterfly Dragon Gliding through the Porte Cochere Royal Pavilion Garden

Print description

A mischievous bearded classic Asian dragon sails through the Porte-Cochere at the Royal Pavilion Garden in Brighton

Print details

Digital pigment print from original ink drawings. Printed on fine art paper using archival inks. Available in sizes A0,A1, A2, A3 or A4 as limited editions of 100. Each print is individually signed and numbered.

Homage to Hokusai and Chen Rong’s Nine Dragons

This print is a homage to two of my favourite artists: Hokusai and Chen Rong.

Hokusai was a master and revolutionary printmaker. In this work I echo some of his motifs: natural patterns such as clouds, blossoming branches, flowering bushes, birds and a geometric background. I have also reinterpreted his compositional approach. The image was built from separate sheets of original ink drawings, each treated as a different plate in a print that eventually comes together to form a single design.

For the dragons I looked to Nine Dragons by Chen Rong. In 2013 I visited the exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700–1900 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Seeing Nine Dragons was unforgettable.

The nearly nine-metre handscroll, created around 1244, shows dragons emerging through clouds, water and mountains. The work expresses the powerful, shifting forces of nature described in Daoist thought.

Regency architecture. The Royal Pavilion.

In 1815, John Nash began remodelling the Marine Pavilion into the extraordinary building we see today, in its exuberant Indo-Saracenic style. The works took seven years to complete. The Prince Regent, later George IV, chose Nash as architect. Nash proposed an Indian style, partly in response to the design of the new stable block.

Nash was also influenced by the landscape gardener Humphry Repton, who had published designs for a new palace based on Indian architectural forms. He drew further inspiration from Oriental Scenery by Thomas Daniell and William Daniell (1795–1808).

The result was a romantic exterior composed of domes, towers and minarets. On either side of the large central dome stand two towers that serve the rooms above the Saloon—one containing a staircase, the other originally housing a hoist.

To heighten the picturesque effect, the rendered surfaces of the Pavilion were painted to create the unified appearance of a building made of Bath stone.