"Emerging Artists" at the Edinburgh Gallery of the Bermuda society of Arts

A review by Andrew Trimingham

Quite how the 'emerging' artists were selected for the Bermuda Society of Arts show devoted to them at its Edinburgh Gallery must be left to conjecture.

Some of them emerged some time ago and have been a regular feature at the City Hall Gallery through a number of shows. Others are of much more recent exposure. ChaiT, for example, and the hard working Giles Campbell can only really be regarded as regulars and are well beyond the usual concept of 'emerging'.

Developing might be a more suitable adjective. ChaiT's tight, precise, exacting works are executed in a painterly style well suited to the surreal, a style the artist never quite adopts with real enthusiasm.

In the group to be seen in this show only The Lotus verges on the surreal. Asian subjects are the usual choice and they are rendered with sufficient exactitude to make one wince.

On the other hand such meticulous attention to detail rewards one with coherent anatomy even hands and feet belong believably to their bodies and body weight is balanced and sustained convincingly.

Giles Campbell is emerging only in the sense of steady growth. His two large watercolours, Gibbs Vista and The Sensory Garden both testify to a more comfortable and looser style.

The sky in the former is little short of remarkable. It displays a confidence with humid lack of definition of gathering summer rain clouds exceptionally well.

Equally impressive is the gentle play of light and shade in The Sensory Garden, now tragically under threat from a proposed new hospital.

This unusual garden, designed for the enjoyment of the blind, has an atmosphere in reality all its own,a reality that Giles Campbell catches with notable sensitivity.

Once again, however, Mr. Campbell has tried his hand at oils.

The rather stiff result reinforces my previously expressed thought that he would do better to keep his early struggles with the medium to himself until he has worked out a comfortable relationship with a medium that makes almost exactly opposite demands of the artist to those of watercolours at which he already excels.

Frances Furbert's pastel, Bottles, is an admirable still life study of the play of light through glass and liquid executed with strength and character.

It is her sole work in the show and suggests, in an emerging artist, an interesting future.

Jacqui Woolley, the other artist with only a single work in the show, works in acrylic and has a somewhat Van Goghian vision but in her own more lurid colour scheme.

Her use of warm and cool colours, though undoubtedly dramatic, had an unsettling effect on the finished work. Vibrant reds representing shade threw depth perception to the winds and had the effect of reversing some, but not all the visual planes in the painting.

Lydia Franks colourful impressions of tropical birds were a refreshing change from the usual illustrative treatment given to such subjects.

The treatment was a little uneven and verged on the nervous in places. A search for greater simplicity of style might well prove very rewarding for an artist already confident with both colour and composition.

The three acrylics of Peter Weedon were a contrasting collection. The impact and emotion sought in Tranquility could usefully have gained from the clarity of colour treatment in the other two works, both of which seemed to lack much in the way of purpose or message.

Four fine photographs by Tim Hulse and Juliette O'Connor gave useful variety to the show.

Mr. Hulse's dramatic Storm Clouds, Peru silhouetting a predatory vulture had baleful impact. Ms O'Connor's LiveMusic exemplified the frenetic physical gyrations that seem to be the sine qua non of modern musicians.

It is a show presumably designed to instil hope for the future. It succeeds.