After the demise of the Windjammer Gallery and the Heritage House Gallery artists in Bermuda have largely had to make do with the galleries of charitably supported organisations.

Some of these do an extraordinarily good job, given their limited resources. It seems almost tragic, then, that Masterworks, whose charitable support must exceed that of all the other supported galleries put together, seems quite unable to mount a show with much, if any, pretension to professional quality.

It is fairly well known that I go to review a show in the afternoon immediately preceding its opening. Obviously it is impossible to review a show at its opening. There are too many people. After the opening one can be influenced by the red stickers indicating commercial popularity. I went to Masterworks' Rose Garden Gallery last Friday afternoon at about three o'clock (two hours before the opening reception) and found myself following three tourists into the gallery. The lights were out. I turned them on. There was no one at all to ensure that nothing was stolen or defaced.

There was a catalogue available and it was numbered sequentially with the paintings on the wall. However it entirely omitted the name of the artist. Fortunately I remembered that the artist was Andrea Carter (I think), who is, I believe, Mrs. Deputy Governor. The paintings were discretely signed with an A. No help there.

After I had made my notes I turned the lights out and departed. In all the time I was there no one appeared to check up on the security of the show. No one seemed to care what might happen in this open, darkened, unoccupied gallery with someone else's paintings on the wall. Nothing suggested that I or the tourists ahead of me should not enter.

I don?t know if the show is insured. If it was and I were the insurance company, I would think again. If it wasn't and I wanted to exhibit my works, I would certainly do it elsewhere. For an organisation that raises money with such spectacular success, it is otherwise about as unprofessional an art gallery as it could possibly be.

It is unfortunate that at least seven of Andrea Carter's works had been shown before. One wonders if the gallery knew this. If they did, are they content to be a gallery of last resort to push marked down merchandise? Mrs. Carter, whose works were so cavalierly treated, is a competent painter, if a little heavy handed.

There is little to cavil at in respect to her technique and in places her skill and technique shine. She is, however, in terms of her subject matter, quite off the wall. The single adjective to describe the show would be weird. If one were able to cross the exacting but pedestrian technique of Bruce Stuart with the exotic imagination of Graham Foster, one might possibly give birth to Andrea Carter.

My real problem with Mrs. Carter is that I have no idea where she is coming from or where she is going. Some of the time she seems to revel in the memories of the terrors of childhood and produces some of her better work in this vein. On the other hand an adult sense of primeval conflict seems to be the basis of "Strangers of the Third Kind", a work I have seen before. "A Very Bad Man" reminded me of the days of our childhood when my brother and I used to compete to see who could draw the most terrifying humanoid monster. I think we beat Mrs. Carter hands down. Its point escaped me. Had it resembled Osama or Dubya it might have had relevance.

"Pukk the Bear Minder" is well executed and has drama, but you need to be a fan of the movie version of The Lord of the Rings to see any relevance to it. 'Alas, Poor Yorick' is equally disorienting. A dead and skeletal Hamlet seems to be addressing either Polonius or Old Father Time instead of Horatio. If there is a point, it isn't obvious.

"A Witch's Prayer", the most effectively executed painting in the show, seemed entirely devoid of any but the most obvious and superficial meaning.

"The Haunted Forest", too, seemed little deeper than an obvious version of a child's garden of terrors.

One suspects that Mrs. Carter gets a lot more fun from her painting than she manages to pass on to her viewers.