After a quarter of a century as one of Bermuda?s most accomplished pastel artists, Sharon Wilson says she is now trying to take her art deeper to get to the very heart of what makes Bermudians tick.

The evolution of Ms Wilson?s work can be seen in a new exhibit, ?Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Art? opening on April 29 at the Bermuda National Gallery. The show is a retrospective of her work over the last quarter of a century.

?When I started, the definition of what it meant to be an artist was being able to draw people in a way that looked like them and was proportionate. That is what I wanted from it.

?As you get closer to reaching that goal you want more. You want the mood of the person and the tone, the passion, all that emotional stuff. You always want something more.?

She said after an artist learns the technical side of things, they need to figure out their agenda.

?You need to know what it is that you want to say,? she said. ?You want to get beneath the surface to the things that are irritating you.?

When Lifestyle?s reporter and photographer visited Ms Wilson in the Sharon Wilson Studio in Southampton she was working on a series of pastels. One piece featured men moving stone from a quarry. Another piece featured a group of men chatting outside a roadside fish stand.

Many of her earlier works that gained her praise in Bermuda featured women and children, two girls telling each other a secret, a mother doing her daughter?s hair or giving her baby a bath, or a grandmother preparing a meal.

The new works involving men at work are a slight departure from that.

?I think there has been a conscious decision for the last five or eight years to try to be more conscious of people in the landscape, instead of taking people out of their landscape context,? said Ms Wilson. ?I have neglected men for a long time.

?I made a conscious effort to try to get men in my paintings. I have also expanded the age range of the people that I paint.?

Ms Wilson said it is more difficult to paint men working in a busy quarry than it is to paint a woman bathing a baby, simply because of the logistics.

To accomplish her mission of ?getting deeper?, Ms Wilson takes a digital camera and snaps pictures that she might like to draw or use to make composites.

Her quarry pictures were from photographs taken in a quarry shortly after Hurricane Fabian in September 2003.

?The quarry was hopping,? she said. ?Everyone needed slate. I thought this is a good opportunity to get the shots that I wanted.?

But she said it is difficult to move from painting the superficial to more intimate subjects without feeling like a voyeur. ?Bermuda is so small that the minute you leave the street and go to the person, it is very personal,? she said. ?It is hard to find a distance that is something in between superficial and intimate.?

Ms Wilson said Bermuda?s small community made extra challenges for local painters. In her latest works the figures do not have identifiable faces.

This is because Bermudians often stand in front of her paintings, not appreciating her message, but trying to figure out who is in the picture.

?Everybody knows everybody,? she said. ?If I want to paint about subject matters that are not so pleasant and people are concerned with the who then it takes the attention away from what I am trying to say.

?You look at a painting that was done by Edward Hopper and no one expects that they will know someone in the painting.?

She talked about one painting she did of a Bermudian singer.

?She liked it,? said Ms Wilson. ?She didn?t buy the painting, but she liked it. Whenever she wanted to show it to someone she would bring them around.

?One day she came in and it was gone. I told her a guy from New York bought it. She said: ?But he doesn?t know me?. I said he didn?t care. It was just the face that he liked.?

She said in Bermuda because people can know anybody, they expect they would know who is in the painting.

?If you have a car in the painting and you put the license number, Bermuda is the only place in the world where people know other people?s car numbers,? she said.

Ms Wilson said this works against the artist, because the viewer concentrates on what the artist considers to be superficial. ?They are missing what I want to get at,? she said. ?That means I do not get to paint the nudes I want to paint. Artists often say, ?let the work speak for itself?. The more I tell you the more influenced you are by what I have told you.?

She said she is trying to get at what lies beneath the surface of this sunny, supposedly carefree island.

?What makes Bermuda looks so idyllic and in other ways be so tense and anxious?? she said. ?The space is disappearing. There is the high cost of living.

?Trying to encapsulate that into one frame is a daunting task. If I was a film artist I would have time to try and orchestrate it and condense it. You have to start looking for the symbolism that will be understood by the largest number of viewers.?

She said the exhibition, ?Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Art? will also give her a chance to take stock of how far she has come since her career began in the late 1970s.

?It will be interesting to see it with all its imperfections,? she said. ?It will be like calling back old friends.?

Her first paintings sold for around $500. Today her paintings are sometimes sold at $10,000 and are available to the masses in poster form and also in notecards.

?When I came out of college I was always concerned with painting people as opposed to places,? she said. ?There have never been very many people in Bermuda painting people.

?A lot of people don?t go to galleries or openings. They are not part of the art crowd. It was only when the art moved into the arena of mass printing that they became aware.?

Her friends and family would tell her that people had approached them with wonderful art finds from Canada, England or the United States.

They were disbelieving when they were told that they could have bought the same thing in Bermuda, and the artist lived in Southampton.

?When art starts to move into the mass print domain then there is a kind of recognition because you can show it to a much broader group,? Ms Wilson said.

She said when she started painting, just painting black people was a departure from the norm.

?I was a child of the fifties,? she said. ?When I went to Whitney Institute it was the year that Whitney became desegregated. There weren?t any black images anywhere. Hallmark didn?t have any cards for Mother?s Day for black people. It was a different time.

?You were in a society where imagery was everywhere but you were never in it. In the department of tourism ads you never saw any black people. It was like you weren?t there.?

She recalled the effect of painting four little girls at Prospect Primary. When she finished the painting of the girls she took it to the school to show them.

?They came and they said ?Oh, Ms Wilson, look at my hair; look at my braids; look at my shoes.? They were saying, ?It me. I am there.?

?It was some kind of validation. For me that was probably much more meaningful to see them so excited about it. These were not disadvantaged children who had never seen photographs of themselves. Art is prized above a photograph.

?When I was five, I asked my mother ?how come they don?t have any brown children in the storybook?? My mother would be really embarrassed and say ?never mind about that. You just make sure that you can the story?.?

She said she paints out of her own experiences, like most artists.

?I am doing this for me,? she said. ?It is a cathartic thing to do. This is therapy. This is me trying to work through something for the self first. The public who comes to see the painting is just interest accrued on the principal.?

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