When well-known Bermuda artist Diana Tetlow's solo exhibition, 'Chinese Orange', opens at the New Heritage House Gallery next weekend, it will be without a portrait she did of US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, details of which she has kept secret for many years.

A longtime admirer of General Powell and his wife, Alma, when the artist learned that he would be visiting Bermuda some years ago she decided to paint his portrait as a gift, hopefully as a happy reminder of his stay here. Consulting with his close friend Sir John Swan, who provided her with a photograph and also critiqued the work in progress, as well as doing her own research, Mrs. Tetlow completed the portrait, which she personally presented to him at Sir John's home.

"I painted it just prior to the election of President George W. Bush, when it wasn't general news that General Powell might be the next Secretary of State," Mrs. Tetlow says. "The general told me that, as President Reagan's National Security Advisor, he had been presented with commemorative portraits from many of the countries he had visited, and there were enough of them for him and his wife Alma to create a small gallery on the walls of the exercise room in the basement of their Virginia home."

These portraits apparently reflected their origins either by the costumes in which the artists had attired General Powell, or in which they translated his features into the ethnicity of the country of origin.

"I tried to imagine him pedalling a stationery bike while reviewing himself as a Lithuanian count," Mrs. Tetlow says. "There was also one that was a gift from Detroit where it was decided that General Powell's nose was not broad enough for a black man, and it was 'adjusted' accordingly. He was a charming man, and his sense of humour in telling me the story about all the other portraits in his gym was very disarming."

However, Mrs. Tetlow took no artistic licence with the famous statesman.

"I have always been an admirer of General Powell's integrity and moral clarity, neither of which need glorifying, so I just painted him as I saw him," she says. "After he left Bermuda with the finished portrait I received a letter thanking me for the painting. Later, when he wrote me again telling me that his wife liked the portrait so much that she had retrieved it from their basement gallery, and hung it on the wall of the familys living room where it was now 'a treasured heirloom' I was extremely happy with what I had achieved."

Despite this honour, Mrs. Tetlow regrets that, due to time constraints, her only record of the three-quarter length portrait of her famous subject is a hastily-taken photgraph of its upper portion which she says is not reflective of its true colours, so some day she hopes she may be given an opportunity to photograph it again "in situ".

Meanwhile, she is looking forward to the opening of her new exhibition whose title, 'Chinese Orange', is taken from a colour in a previously-unfamiliar brand of Sennelier oil paints, which ultimately led her to experiment with colours outside her normal palette.

"I've always been attracted to warm colours," Mrs. Tetlow says, "but in order to use them in paintings, it is necessary to find their complementary colours and use them near together where you want to create maximum impact. Mixing complementary colours will give you wonderful greys. I am constantly referring to paintings by artists I admire in order to work out their use of colour. Without being a plagiarist, I often take inspiration from painters like Sargent and Sorolla, and in this exhibition I have shamelessly made a variation of one of Picasso's paintings in order to make a point."

Whereas the artist's preferred medium has been pastels for most of her career, her upcoming exhibition will be exclusively oils, and predominantly "people oriented". It opens to the public on Saturday, June 26 and continues through July 10.