Sheraton

The title of this painting refers to a large hotel built in Symonds Street (it is today the Cordis). In 1984 after Julian Dashper left art school he worked as a taxi driver in Auckland. He often sat in the early hours of the morning at a taxi rank close to the building site of the hotel. He enjoyed watching its pre-cast concrete slab construction and, after it was completed, was intrigued at the generic internationalism of its style. He watched the doorman in top hat and bow tie and observed the placement of urns with a Greek key pattern around the rim flanking the main entrance. On a small drawing board attached to his car’s dashboard he began to make sketches of these things. The climax of all this activity came when Dashper and his wife spent a night as guests of the hotel. This work was made in immediate response to that occasion. Large areas of canvas have been allowed to show through a composition based on converging and diverging lines in bright colours.