Pedal cycling around the Island allowed artist Stella Shakerchi to see Bermuda from an expressionist viewpoint.

Ms Shakerchi?s show is the second show in the Masterworks Foundation?s Artist in the Garden series and her show opens in the Rose Garden Gallery, Botanical Gardens, on Friday evening.

She began painting Bermuda over four years ago after an artist friend told her about the Island and its beauty.

?My instant impression was that she was right,? she said. ?At first I was quite literally blinded by the light and after painting a lot of seascapes and palms, I found ways to get used to the glare, and work with it. I eventually found that I was most comfortable painting scenes quite close-up and interpreting the atmosphere of an area, usually through concentrating on features of the remarkable and the unique architecture here.?

By travelling around the Island on her pedal cycle she appreciates the different light throughout the day.

?I go around everywhere on my pedal-bike, and I see all these lovely places at different times of day,? she said.

?Waterville (The National Trust headquarters) for example, looks so proper and engaging in the early morning, but catch it at twilight, and it?s so calm, with hints of history, it?s in repose, and sea-air brimming around its windows.

?While I sat there sketching it, all the charming architectural details struck me, but strolling around it in the evening, different senses were roused, and this is how the expressionist paintings came about.

?Working on each one by one and after completing a realistic watercolour, keeping the paint as clear and transparent as possible and the finished pieces as simple as I could to represent what I saw.

?I would take that and work it up into a m?lange of complexities, trying to capture colour upon colour and the sensory aspects of each place and the feelings it evoked.

?These expressionist pieces are in pastel and acrylic, with Klimt-like detail. The idea was to capture the immediate sensory experience of each place, and I felt that acrylic has that punch in colour to achieve this.?

She has been working on the this show since last October and all the paintings were done on the Island.

?I couldn?t have painted them anywhere else!? said Ms Shakerchi.

Though, for the snug interiors, she wanted something with a more sustained and reassuring feeling.

?Which is why they are all oil on canvas,? said Ms Shakerchi who has also held exhibitions in Europe.

?These are what may be the inside of some of the set of close-view landscapes. I like that contrast from open airy watercolour to intimate luxuriant oil colours.

?The paintings are inviting, and sometimes a story line can be gleaned from the scene or the objects in the picture. Bonnard and Matisse have been influential in these pieces.

?It?s important to me to be able to paint from life, otherwise I always feel there is something missing. Luckily all of the landscapes had been sketched on site, and it has been so pleasurable standing in a scene and interacting with its dimensions and sensing its moods for this exhibition.?

All the landscapes are real places in Bermuda and she was trying to get an accurate sense of the scale and charm in her watercolours.

?Then expand that into maybe a more wide angle vision of those places with expressionism, which developed in response to being in Bermuda, against the backdrop of European art,? she said.

?The European thing comes in a lot more obviously on the interiors, which can be places in Bermuda ? some are the interiors to the landscape houses.

?Or could be island life on some other sunny islands we are familiar with.?

Her show opens at 5.30 p.m. until 7 p.m. on Friday evening. For more information ( 236-2950.