The paintings of Hilary Thorpe convey a sense of happiness and excitement. It appears as if she just got in there and splashed around in paint, but somehow all the splashes seem to have landed just where they belong in the picture.

Often when someone is good at something, they do it with such ease and grace, it appears as an easy activity. Ms Thorpe has that ability.

It is obvious that she paints quickly but since just about all her paintings presently being shown in the Colonial Insurance Foyer Gallery are of the sea and often of sail boats, all this splashing seems to impart a sense of salt spray and motion.

Altogether, there are 52 paintings in her exhibition. This is a fair accomplishment, considering that Hilary Thorpe has been here maybe a couple months only. Her method of painting is what is called “Alla Prima”. This is Italian, meaning, “at once”, or painted in one session, while the paint is still quite wet.

I asked Ms Thorpe about how she goes about making a painting. She said that she always paints on location.

Here most of her paintings are fairly small, but she indicated that this is only because of having to get around by public transport. Her medium of choice while here in Bermuda is acrylic paint. This is to facilitate painting on location, as acrylic paint dries quickly.

Although Ms. Thorpe uses a variety of formats, especially rectangles of varying shapes and sizes and squares; she seems to favour both long and narrow panoramic rectangles and squares.

Many are only a few inches wide and maybe a foot or so long. With a number of her paintings, especially her smaller ones, several were framed together. Usually they relate subject and colour-wise.

In one framed work she had three small square views of the Great Sound and Dockyard, as seen from Spanish Point.

In another she displayed three panoramic views, one being Fort St. Catherine, another was of Boaz Island, but the third location was more difficult to identify. In yet another, she had ten small paintings framed together.

In this case, the views were from all various parts of Bermuda, but especially the western end, from Hamilton to the Dockyard, with lots of views in between.

It seems that she was attempting to give a sense of the journey out to Dockyard by ferry. Although obviously painted quickly, in many instances, with only a few strokes of the palette knife, she has been able to convey a definite sense of location. In most cases, I knew exactly what the subject was and from where it was painted.

She has, with the greatest economy, conveyed a definite sense of place.

The exhibition continues through May 18.