A Sheilagh Head Show is always cause for celebration -- and especially so, this year; just as we might assume she has reached the peak of her considerable powers, she is able to surprise us as she moves serenely into yet another dimension.

She stands apart from Bermuda's other landscape painters of the past as well as the present, in that she paints, not views, but the spirit of the land, a spirit that is concerned with light and shadow, the flash of brilliance that illuminates the softest of surrounding hues, a sense of timelessness that pervades the evolving colours of the day.

Sheilagh Head is Bermuda's supreme colourist, a seemingly natural gift that is nevertheless allied with a formidable drawing technique acquired during years of schooling in Italy and England. Like all good technique , it is as subtle as it is sure, which makes her one of the very few artists working in Bermuda today who is effortlessly able to translate a knowledge of form and composition into an exercise in poetic expression.

This is especially apparent in her miniatures of Bermudian architecture where her draughtsmanship reveals her absorption of architecture with such ease that she can condense the essentials of a chimney here and a gable there, and with the sparest of strokes, convey a richness of light and shade that captures their sense of drowsing antiquity.

At first glance, this collection of 40 oil paintings may appear to be vintage Head. Even her subject matter changes little from show to show: she continues to paint the South shore and the sandy paths of its dunes, White's Island and the ancient buildings of St. George's.

But we are soon aware that, as never before, Sheilagh Head's technique has undergone a refining process, a simplification of style that edges towards the abstract.

While she has never been shy about removing a particular cottage or boat if she feels it is irrelevant to her personal perception of a landscape, she is now more concerned than ever with the essence, rather than the figurative truth, of all that she beholds.

Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in her two studies of Flatts.

The distant cluster of buildings that constitute the old village look familiar enough, but it is the cacophony of colours which dance across the water that is now the focus of her attention. She expands this theme in the second, larger version where her brush luxuriates in ripples of water that is at once shot with brilliant blues, turquoise, jades, mauves and pinks. It is painted with great elan, yet speaks ultimately, of a deeply felt lyricism.

The sky, too, is much on Sheilagh Head's mind in this exhibition. In painting after painting, it is the sky, rising over a ribbon of sea or a swathe of foliage, that predominates and it is the treatment of her skies that epitomises this distillation of her art. For she paints, not its literal appearance but her memory of it at a given season or time of day. This may reach symphonic proportions as she envelops the canvas in ever-shifting patterns of lavender blues, yellows, flushing pinks and the softest of greys.

It is indeed "the glory and the freshness of a dream''.

In the aptly titled God Calling, a shaft of sunlight filters from a sky that is charged with an aura of pale amethyst, while Evening Light captures that brief, magical moment when sky and water merge in a suffusion of pink and lilac light.

We are still able to share Sheilagh Head's mystery excursions -- though whether these deserted cottages, rising like white-washed mirages from tangles of morning glory and poppy-strewn grasses, really exist or are merely a figment of her imagination, is anyone's guess. Where does she find the secret gardens brushed with freesias, or the agapanthas and Easter lilies holding sway in a wild landscape of deeply overgrown fields where shadows assume the blue-black of night? Don't miss this opportunity of seeing such a large collection of her work in one, very lingering glance. It is a feast for the eye and manna for the soul.

PATRICIA CALNAN ST. GEORGE'S LANE -- One of the miniature oils featured in Sheilagh Head's exhibition of paintings now on show at Heritage House.