A review of paintings for a calendar present something of a challenge for the reviewer.

Betsy Mulderig's series of 12 paintings at the Masterworks Gallery at Camden, commissioned as a set for a commercial calendar, may be looked at on two levels: purely as paintings or as commercially intended works relating, month by month, to the passage of a year. The difficulty is in combining the two approaches.

This is particularly difficult when the artist concerned has suited her fey, whimsical style of painting to a particular refinement of the impressionist tradition: the pointillist. The theory behind pointillism was to break down colour and light into its fundamental parts, broken down into its pure components and applied with meticulous care, tiny dab by tiny dab, to produce the natural effect observed by the human eye.

This was a reduction, almost ad absurdio, of the impressionists' concentration on light and its effect on colour and shape. It was also immensely time consuming and eventually became so visually difficult that the only way to enjoy a pointillist work was either professionally with a magnifying glass, or aesthetically from a distance sufficient to blur the dots into the impression desired. Its most famous proponent was Seurat and at least one of his works is clearly the inspiration for one of Ms Mulderig's. When Ms Mulderig takes the time and pains to do it right her work verges on the brilliant. Unfortunately, she sometimes cheats in the interest of time saved and the quality of some of the work is thus a little diminished.

This exacting discipline suits Ms Mulderig's somewhat otherworldly style extremely well. One of her most noticeable characteristics is that none of the people in her paintings seem to relate in any way to any of the other people. In this series there are plenty of people and the effect of their dissociation is almost unnerving. It is an integral part of what grips the consciousness of the viewer in the artist's work but not necessarily immediately.

Ms Mulderig also understands the rules of anatomy well enough to break them to effect. Her figures tend to verge on the formalised obese, her hands and feet are disproportionately small. All this serves to place her people at a remove from the immediacy of their place and time and adds effectively to the underlying fey sense of all her work. There is, however, an exception to this anatomical understanding. The cricket player representing July in the series has an admirably foreshortened thigh, but a sadly inept, flattened shoulder that takes the starch out of what would otherwise have been one of the best months.

Taking the months in order, January is a festive scene of an expanded family and their two dachshunds with festive paper hats and raised glasses of wine toasting the New Year. As usual, her family seems not quite to connect one with another. February, appropriately enough is represented by loquats, but is otherwise rather sunny and tranquil for so unquiet a month.

March, quite uncharacteristically has people lying about in the sun on a beach with umbrellas. My idea of March is that the beach would be deserted and the umbrellas blown away. Each to his or her own. April, another unstable month in Bermuda, is appropriately devoted to flowers, but the pointillism, where it might have been most effective, is a little skimped.

May is the painting most obviously derived from a Seurat work. It shows the usual dissociated people looking out over the shore, but a shore more like a riverbank. June is, of course, the month for weddings. Here the unhappy couple, for that is the way they look, failing to have any apparent connection with one another at all, stand in front of a church between a pair of rather ominous sentinel trees. July, of course, is represented by the cricketer.

August shows a lost feature of the Island's erstwhile beauty, the Natural Arches beach. This remarkable Bermudian feature, long celebrated in our advertising, was destroyed in Hurricane Fabian and I am always somehow saddened when I now see it painted or in photographs.

The September figure of a mother with a small child in one arm, the other tiny hand holding the even tinier hand of an older child, a ferry in the background, is perhaps the most unnerving of all. There is not the least sign of affection or even mutual awareness in the small family. It is almost eerie. The October scene is the oddest of all. It is of a dock scene in St. George's and it looks as if we had just had our first snowfall. The pointillism, too, is less meticulously rendered than usual, giving the effect of quite a heavy snowfall. The "ring around the moon" marking November, suggests the advent of winter weather and December, perhaps inevitably, is marked by Gombeys.

This is a remarkable set of paintings, a little varied in quality, but unmistakably a set. It was a pity, therefore, to see them being sold (quite briskly) to individual buyers and thus separated forever from their family.

It is unfortunate that the bank that commissioned them for a calendar did not also purchase the whole set.