I don't always review shows at the Masterworks Gallery in Bermuda House Lane because all are small shows presented in rapid succession. Distressingly, many of them are not at all good.

The current show by William Gringley is better than most, despite his tiresome predilection for nudes and near nudes.

The artist has a sound grasp of anatomy, but nudes are still nudes. The last artist to render them with real artistic brilliance was William Russell Flint who painted some 60 or 70 years ago and was a watercolourist at that.

There must be millions of other also-ran nudes filling attics and cellars all over the world. They fall into the same general bin as the tourist oriented landscapes and seascapes so harshly but derided recently by Gregory Volk. The remaining two thirds of the show, however, is interesting.

Mr. Gringley's style is astonishingly varied and ranges from a rather tight, almost pointillist style to a broadly rendered, relaxed approach that is its diametric opposite. His range of colour schemes is equally varied, ranging from bright and colourful to almost morbid and gloomy. All of this is encompassed in the 11 paintings that are not nudes.

"Coot Pond, St. George's" is in the bright and cheerful category and enjoys a colourful pointillist contrast to a setting of solid rack background.

It contrasts strongly with the next work, "The Canal", where the sparse pointillist overlay is backed by a loosely brushed base, the whole rendered in a damply gloomy colour scheme perfectly suited to its subject "David's Mountain" is a conventional Rocky Mountain scene with autumnal aspens providing the colour emphasis, a rock-strewn stream providing the foreground and the eponymous mountain the background.

It is technically proficient and it took me some time to understand why my eye kept returning to it.

Mr. Gringley has a curious way of reducing the depth of his works by not cooling his background colours. The result is a slightly uncomfortable sense of claustrophobia, a sense much stronger in "Green on Green" where there is no conventional escape.

Another highly proficient work is "Mid-air", a scene with waterfowl on the New England coast. There it would probably qualify as a tourist-trap painting; here one can still enjoy the quality of the painting.

I have a gut reaction against sunsets and I had one against "Sunset" despite its darkening copper rather than pink colour scheme.

The painting is, however, technically proficient and Mr. Gringley's water behaves like water and his admirable group of little boys standing in the surf has weight, movement and believable anatomy.

So do the two wonderfully inactive men in what I thought easily the best two paintings in the show.

In his most relaxed, simple style matched with a relaxed simple colour scheme, the two paintings of Spanish Point, one horizontal and one vertical, have an almost identical subject.

The only serious change from the first to the second is in the two sparsely rendered figures of men standing about doing not much. From the first painting to the next one figure has moved to stand closer to the other. So relaxed and quintessentially Bermudian in feel are these paintings that one almost experiences vicarious exhaustion from the effort involved just in that short move, the length of a small boat.

This show runs but two weeks. It is worth stopping by.