Henry Ward is no stranger to Bermuda — and certainly not as a professional artist and exhibitor.

Beginning with three sell-out exhibitions at Nicholas Lusher Fine Art years ago, he also numbers the Burnaby Gallery and the Desmond Fountain Gallery among the local venues at which his work has been successfully shown, and he has also participated in three Bermuda National Gallery Biennials.

Mr. Ward's latest solo exhibition opens to the public on Friday (September 14) at the Kaleidoscope Foundation's Eliot Gallery on Jubilee Road in Devonshire, where he also held a series of portraiture workshops earlier this summer.

The largest part of 'Henry Ward — An Exhibition of New Paintings' will consist of small-scale Bermuda landscapes painted during the summer in and around Longford Hill and Keith Hall Road in Warwick.

Executed in a quieter, more subtle palette than his previous paintings of the Island, they evoke a modern clarity of line and definition of subject.

Figurative paintings, also done in Bermuda, which formed part of his solo exhibition at the John Mitchell Fine Paintings on London, England's famed Bond Street, make up the balance of the exhibition.

While Mr. Ward's connections with the Island go back to 1987 when his late father, Martyn Ward, was Puisne Judge at the Supreme Court, and his mother is still a resident, it is not just as a 'Bermuda painter' that this increasingly sought-after artist wishes to be known. "I am more and more being put on the map as a serious international artist," he says, and his stated goal is the development of a worldwide, international career.

"I want to be a big fish in a big pond, although I still consider Bermuda my home."

Certainly, Mr. Ward has every reason to think along such lines, given his successes and achievements to date, and he now plans to develop a recognition and a client base in Pacific Rim countries.

While still at student at Harrow School in England, his talents showed early promise, and he won the Art Prize five years in succession before attending the Chelsea College of Art, Goldsmiths College, and Winchester School of Art where he gained a Master's degree in contemporary art theory.

A former winner of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters' 'Young Artist of the Year' award, other important milestones in his professional career include a solo exhibition at top figurative gallery, Tatistcheff & Co., on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in New York City, and 'top billing' at an exhibition of Old Harrovian painters at Christie's of London, where his painting was chosen as the main work to hang behind the auctioneer's podium, as well as being featured on the invitation and catalogue covers — alongside works by Winston Churchill and Cecil Beaton.

He was also interviewed about the show by BBC London News.

It is successes such as these which have led to an ever-increasing demand for his work, particularly commissions for full-length figurative portraiture, in which he specialises, and for which there is an extensive waiting list. These include a client who has commissioned four, full-length figuratives portraits of half-clothed young men representing Europe, Africa, Asia and America. In fact, the artist used a Bermuda resident for the 'Africa' portrait.

In executing these life-size portraits, as Bermuda viewers already know, Mr. Ward uses the Old Masters' techniques to create pieces which are fully representational and anatomically correct. He particularly likes chiaroscuro work, which highlights the contrast between dark and light, the latter being representative of the presence of the Divine.

* 'Henry Ward — An Exhibition of New Paintings' officially opens on Friday, September 14 following a private viewing, and continues through October 1. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday, or by appointment (236-5963).