Chris Dawson got goose bumps when he finished his oil painting, Three Queens. The 36-year-old just knew he had something special.

“When I’ve done something good there is a sense of emotion that comes over me that is really strong,” he said.

“Three Queens did that for me. When I stepped back and looked at it and I thought, ‘How the heck did I just do that?’

“For one thing, it was the first time I painted something that big — 34 inches by 55in. The light in the painting was critical. It was well-balanced and well thought out. It had lots of texture. It all just came together.”

Three Queens won the Charman Prize last October and is now a contender for the BP Portrait Award. The prize, given by the National Portrait Gallery in London, recognises the best in contemporary portrait painting.

The painting was of 400 semi-finalists chosen from about 3,000 entries. If it makes the final cut of 50, it will be shown in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery this summer. First prize is £30,000 ($43,400).

“I won’t know until March 30,” Mr Dawson said. “I am just counting the days until then.”

The real difficulty came in shipping the painting to Britain.

“It had to be crated, insured and air freight isn’t cheap,” he said. “It’s in England now, but it has been several days and hasn’t cleared customs yet. That was a bit unnerving, but it will clear soon.”

Three Queens shows his grandmother, Idena Gonsalves, playing cards with her two sisters and a friend.

“They play 500 rummy all the time,” Mr Dawson said. “They have a great time together.

“My grandmother is 85 and very active. When you drive into the yard, you can usually hear their card antics and bantering from the driveway. I’ve been thinking about painting them for some time.”

Charman prize patron John Charman now owns Three Queens. Mr Dawson said: “I am very grateful that he loaned it back to me so that I could enter it into the competition.

“He is a great patron of the arts in Bermuda.”

The artist has a show on at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, Painting the Light. It’s his first solo exhibit since 2010. He admitted to feeling quite vulnerable.

“You are open to criticism,” he said. “All I can do is just paint what I want to paint. At the end of the day I am happy with the work. If people like the work that is a bonus.”

So far the work has been selling well.

“Eighty per cent of the works have sold,” he said.

Fourteen still-life paintings are on display and four portraits. They are inspired by the work of 16th and 17th-century Dutch masters but have a Bermudian twist.

“One of them has a white water snapper in it,” he said. “I don’t know of any other artists who have done still life like this with local fish.”

Getting the fish proved a challenge.

“My boat was still out of the water,” he said. “I asked my friend to get me a snapper when he went out.”

A few days later, the phone rang; the friend had caught the requested fish. Unfortunately, Mr Dawson wasn’t ready for it.

He hurriedly finished off the painting he was working on and then turned his attention to the still life that required the fish.

“I had to just focus on the fish part of the painting before it went off,” he said. “I was putting it in ice and taking it out for a week and surprisingly, it didn’t stink up the place.”

Mr Dawson started drawing as a child. He said: “I started taking it seriously at 8 or 9.

“The more I drew, the more I loved it. Nothing comes easy; there have been many times where drawings and paintings have not worked. But with every drawing you do you learn something from it and pass it on to the next work.”

He had a studio in St George’s for 2½ years but closed it in 2012 when the economy soured. It was a mixed blessing.

“When I was in St George’s I was painting what I thought would sell,” he said. “I was painting a bit more commercially.

“Once I was finished with the studio I was able to concentrate more on what I wanted to paint.

“Everything I have done has led me to where I am now.”

He said the biggest challenge to being an artist in Bermuda was the expense.

“Materials are so expensive,” he said. “I make my own frames. And this is a very small island with only a limited number of people to buy your work.”

He is hoping that if he does get into the British Portrait Show this summer, he will be able to take his grandmother with him.

“We are very close,” he said. “I lived with her for a time. She was ecstatic when I won.

“I don’t know if I will win, but I am happy just to have made it this far.”

Painting the Light runs at Masterworks until April 13.