Dr. Charles Zuill and several others were the founders of the Bermuda National Gallery and the Arts Centre Dockyard.

?I got involved with the Bermuda National Gallery right from the start,? he said.

?Desmond Fountain and I had a studio at Flatts Hill and we always talked about having a permanent collection of art in Bermuda. I don?t think we used the grand title of the National Gallery, but we used to talk about this permanent collection for an art museum.?

Dr. Zuill returned to the Island in 1983 and he immediately got involved with yet another project ? the Arts Centre Dockyard.

?It was a breakaway group from the Bermuda Society of Arts (BSoA) who had become a group of old fuddy duddies,? he said. It was opened in 1984, but somewhere around 1985 or 1986 I was at a party and I ran into Desmond and I hadn?t seen much of him in the years before and I raised the issue of this collection and that I still had an interest in it.

?He had established something called the Fine Art Trust, then his career had taken off and he had shelved it.?

So the pair and several others met to establish a committee to check on the feasibility of what is now the Bermuda National Gallery (BNG).

?I said to Desmond that I wasn?t interested in whether it was feasible, I wanted to make it feasible,? he said.

But he said although people were meeting everyone was not always positive. ?There are people around here that I describe as being toxic ? they see the glass half empty and in spite of everything they are just so negative,? he said.

?I was away at the time and I came back and I saw one of the committee members and asked ?how?s it going? and she said, ?Oh, nothing?s going to happen ? it?s a waste of time, Government is not going to commit to it?.

?And I thought, ?why should they, you have a half-baked plan, why should they commit to anything like that?. When I got involved with this committee to form a National Gallery one of the things we determined right away was that if Government wants to come on board then fine, but we are not going hat in hand to Government.

?We can do this without them, because for one thing we didn?t want them telling us what to do and we didn?t think they knew what to do and we didn?t want that.?

The committee was formed of interested, like-minded people from various organisations.

?We got someone from BSoA, the Arts Centre at Dockyard, the National Trust, someone from Cultural Affairs, and so on and so on. We tried to represent everyone because we wanted to be as inclusive as we could, and we had some really positive people. We put together a team that would work with us and think like us and we never, never talked about whether it was feasible, it was how to make it feasible.

?We got Ruth Thomas on that team straight away. She eventually became Deputy Chair of the Board of Trustees of the BNG and she could have easily become Chairman of the Board, but I think she was wanting to ease back a little. Then she retired from her position.?

The BNG took a few years in the planning stages, but they did not realise that they were in for a few lucky breaks.

They were initially thinking of Dockyard as a location, rather than Hamilton, but the Corporation of Hamilton also wanted to set up a museum in the eastern end of City Hall.

?I think it was the ugliest room in Bermuda,? he said with a laugh. ?It wasn?t much, but they realised that it had potential and they wanted to do something with it, but they thought ?we don?t know how to run an art gallery?.

?So, John Gardner, of Cooper and Gardner (Architects), was on our committee said there was already a group in place and why not offer it to them. So, we went through negotiations and they offered it to us for five years at $25 a year.

?We thought, ?well why not. It is perhaps not as big as we would like, but it is a start?.?

Now they essentially had a house for the art, but it was about turning it into a home.

?We had to come up with a plan for the space because the space itself wasn?t that suitable and we had to fine tune it.

?Getting a consensus took a little bit of doing, but Jay Bluck, who was chairman of the board, came up with a plan, but John Kaufmann told him under no uncertain terms that it was an insult to art.

?He told John Gardner to see what he could come up with and he came up with the plan that we have today. Cooper and Gardner put it together, refined it and created five unique spaces and in theory we could have five separate small shows.

?Then we had to get an estimate of costs and raise the money, but by this time we were in the midst of the recession and Jay Bluck said give me six weeks and I?ll see what I can do.

?After six weeks or so, he said, ?well, I am almost there I just need a couple of more weeks? and he had this together in as far as monies committed.?

At this point they were able to bring in lighting and climate control experts. It was a pretty thrilling experience,? he said.