Whenever I am in London, I find time to visit the National Portrait Gallery. I do this because I am fascinated by people, especially those who have made major contributions to learning or who are highly creative.

In a sense, the National Portrait Gallery is Britain's Hall of Fame.

Additionally, it demonstrates that the traditional society portrait is only one way of depicting the human head and that there are numerous other creative and artistic ways of accomplishing this and often with more engaging results.

I know that some have suggested a Hall of Fame for Bermuda and a Bermuda National Portrait Gallery might be the most feasible, less contentious way of accomplishing this goal.

After all it could house portraits of those of us who have accomplished much in our community, in all the various fields of endeavour.

The current exhibition in the Rick Faries Gallery at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art is a show of recent portraits by Gabriela Brunner. Her portraits are surely not your traditional society portrait, however. Indeed, they are notably untraditional and are characteristically bold, colourful and sometimes border on caricature. This is especially true of 'Cuba', which is also notably cheeky. It depicts a kerchiefed Cuban woman with a large cigar between her teeth.

The kinds of people that usually commission artists to paint portraits are either wealthy or have some institutional connection that wants a portrait of someone high-up in that institution.

The latter is what is sometimes referred to as corporate portraits. An example of this genre is the gallery of mayors in the Hamilton City Hall lobby. This is the expected kind of portrait and is usually of someone well known. Most of Gabriela Brunner's portraits are of the unknown. With the exception of Albert Einstein, the only other person I could identify was 'The Voice of Summer', Jim Woolridge.

Although some of her portraits show the human head at about normal size, many are highly enlarged.

When I was studying art – and bear in mind that most of my training was in very traditional, academic institutions – I was told that portraits should never be larger than life size. I also remember being told when young that green and blue should never be combined in clothing. Rules, rules!

Such rules are made to be broken and as for Gabriela Brunner, she breaks them with all the brashness she can muster.

This is a must see show, the exhibition ends tomorrow, so you will have to make a point of seeing it soon.