I am not an enthusiast of written explanations needed to explain an artist?s work. I believe it is the job of the artist to express what he or she wishes to express in the work itself, not in words. If the artist needs words perhaps they should have been writers and not painters in the first place.

Dr. Charles Zuill relies heavily on words to explain his work.

The Bermuda National Gallery is honouring Dr. Zuill, one of its founders, with a retrospective of his life's work. The works cover a productive span of almost 40 years.

There are 46 of them and they divide into three groupings: Early Works, a long period described as Gray Scale works, and an ongoing period assigned the title Soil Paintings. Dr. Zuill is an educator and his work certainly falls into the category of academic painting.

His early works, of which five are shown, date from the late 60s and early 70s and are, by his own admission, derivative. It isn't difficult to identify the artists who inspired this period in his painting.

What is difficult to understand is how completely unaffected Dr. Zuill seems to have been by the passion and intensity that gave these artists their preeminence.

His paintings, though academically unexceptionable, entirely lack the fire of his models. The adjective cold may best be used to describe them.

Piranesi would probably not, however, have been too delighted with the work titled "Homage to Piranesi", even during his disturbing and probably disturbed Carceri period.

For so academic a mind and so exacting a painter to think that so untidy an agglomeration of scratchings, albeit in an oppressive compositional format familiar from the Carceri works, reflects well on Piranesi is utterly baffling.

Perhaps the best and most effective of these works is one titled "In Memory of Mary Rolandson". It has all the warmth of a tombstone in a damp churchyard.

Dr. Zuill's middle year works, his "Gray Scale" are nothing if not exactingly academic obsessively so in fact. The Gray Scale is an exercise required of art students at every art school worth the name.

It is the process of producing a series of shades in precise, graduated sequence from white to black. It is an exercise necessary to the development of good technique.

Begun as an attempt to overcome artist's block in Dr. Zuill's case, it seems to have become a spectacular case of arrested development. It lasted for some 20 years from 1968 to 1988.

It became the subject of his doctoral dissertation at New York University and any number of meticulously executed works, by no means all of which were technically speaking in the Gray Scale.

He often replaces black with any number of colours and arranges his scales in sometimes fascinating counterpoint. They are all, however, passionless, obsessive and cold.

His latest and current obsession is with soil, the interpretation of which has expanded from the soils in which plants grow to any natural substance that can be suspended in a medium and applied to a more or less flat surface.

This much more interesting obsession survives in his current work and derives from a typically academic source: the study of Ruskin who claimed he could make mud glow if only he could gradate it from light to dark.

After 20 years of doing nothing but this kind of gradation this was clearly a challenge that Dr. Zuill could not pass up. He did exactly what Ruskin proposed and the result was exactly what Ruskin predicted.

The exercise liberated Dr. Zuill from his obsession with the Gray Scale and has led him in a direction that has produced far more interesting results.

The impression is nevertheless one of a slightly mad alchemist huddled in his laboratory searching experimentally for the philosopher's stone.

The experiments in the ongoing search have, however, produced much the most interesting of Dr. Zuill's lifetime of work. They appear as a series of abstracts, some derived from serendipity, others from manipulation of his medium.

The movement of his materials in his media can produce some intriguing patterns and forms and for this viewer I preferred to study the minutiae of effects in the works to the general effect of most of them.

Taken as a whole, however, the work of Dr. Charles Zuill can be regarded at best as coldly academic. Such passion as there is seems more the passion of the scientist or educator than of the artist.