Bermuda has a way of taunting the plein air landscape painter: “Just try to capture this blue. I dare you.” Michele Smith is up to the task, as is readily visible in her current exhibition, “Bermuda Through My Palette”. Curated by Jasmine Lee and open through August 15, in the Rick Faries Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, Ms Smith’s interpretations of the Bermudian landscape convey a confidence and punch, jumping off the gallery walls to unabashedly meet the challenge of the island’s colourful array.

Elsewhere, plein air, or open air painters enhance colour for expressive purposes, amping up the experience of the setting. In Bermuda, Smith finds, vibrancy is everywhere she visits.

“That’s why it is so fun to paint in Bermuda,” Smith said. “Sometimes it’s hard to capture the accurate vibrancy, but you can play with it.”

The loose application and liberated combination of colours — citrines, cerises, topazes, and violets — approximate the view without defining it. Her translation is not literal, but remains recognisable to the viewer, allowing them to connect with the composition.

The audience’s response at the July 7 artist talk in the Rick Faries Gallery made clear how effective her approach is. One visitor responded to a view of John Smith’s Bay and recalled learning to swim there. Another visitor revisited her wedding on Cambridge Beaches through Smith’s translation. The feeling of the site, more than its description, is what drew in the viewer.

Smith does not have a specific moment in mind when she begins to explore a setting, and she allows herself the license to shift perspectives and reconfigure the landscape. The nature of plein air painting, where compositions begin and are sometimes completed in the setting, pushes the artist to capture an ineffable quality of a specific place.

Bermuda Plein Air, a group to which Smith belongs, is a rotating consortium of artists meeting over the last 20 years at locations throughout the island to share techniques and provide each other feedback.

Her paintings are not simply records of these shared excursions, though. Smith explains: “I go outside and try to establish a viewpoint, a time of day, the location of lights and shadows, the reflection off the water.”

With each solitary depiction, though, there are elusive points of similarity that emerge only after visual contemplation.

Smith confirmed how, sometimes, paint remaining on her palette provided the signals for her next compositions.

That’s how she described the genesis of the two bovine heads, Billy and Lucy, who greet the viewer from the far end of the gallery. Smith has long been interested in painting the island’s wildlife, especially the chickens. No chickens appear in this exhibition, but these two cows are striking for being both unnaturally coloured and resolutely lifelike. Like the landscapes, they record Smith’s investigation of how colour can make the familiar seem new and strange.

Another element lending consistency to this exhibition, one that is new to Smith’s practice, is the staccato textures derived from her experimentation with the palette knife.

At times, as in Island Home, the texture is so tactile that it almost reads as collage. In this example specifically, the layers of colour bleed to a uniform border of crimson, dispersed evenly across the surface. Like a tapestry, hues weave in and out, flattening the surface and denying a focal point.

In other paintings, like Crystal Clear, the palette-knife mark is individually legible, almost mosaic-like. The texture is palpable, even overshadowing the colour, providing a second meaning for the exhibition’s title, Bermuda Through My Palette. The palette knife, not just the colours on the palette, indicates an additional visual device.

Watercolours installed near the larger composition clarify Smith’s process of plein air study and studio elaboration. Their inclusion, carefully handled by Lee, informs the viewer without distracting from the impact of the larger compositions. Rather, they provide a point of origin, a genesis, that augments rather than distracts.

Another visual element that pulls the distinct scenes into an interrelated body of work is Smith’s handling of shadow. As the Modernist painter E Ambrose Webster recognised on his visits to the island, colour resides in the shadow, and in Bermuda even more so.

Purple steps forward as shadows, but not darkened or obscured ones. Smith acknowledged her desire to push colour to its extreme. “I am not a wimpy painter,” she said. “I am happy to use a lot of colour. I want a painting to be joyful and happy.”

Considering the prominence of texture, colour, and shifting viewpoints, one would not expect the exhibition to read as a whole rather than as competing moments. It does hold together, though, and heralds the next phase of this accomplished artist’s plein air adventure.