'Ayrton Senna' by Nikki Douthwaite

Nikki Douthwaite (1974-2022) was a remarkable British portrait artist celebrated for her innovative use of small paper dots in an array of colours that close-up look like an abstract painting, but from a distance have an almost photographic quality. She is the World Record holder for an artwork containing the greatest number of items with her picture inspired by Seurat’s famous painting ‘A Sunday Afternoon’ that contains 575,000 individually applied paper dots. This is on public display in the US.

Nikki was a pioneer in this medium  and has been commissioned by notable figures such as Simon Cowell, LeBron James, Martin Brundle and Ron Dennis. Her works have been showcased on the BBC F1 show and the One Show and her John Lennon artwork is on public display at Liverpool airport.

Her passion was motorsport and she spent several years building up a stunning collection of all of the McLaren F1 World Champions, subsequently displayed at the McLaren Technology Centre. None of these works have been made available for sale previously and we are delighted to have been asked to auction her images of Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton. The artworks are large-format, 1.6 x 1.22 metre portraits that each took several months to complete as they contain over 100,000 individually applied, coloured dots which were then matt varnished.

The proceeds of the sale are to benefit her twin sons, born shortly before she passed away.