Gallery .

The recent trend towards "double'' art openings continued last week when Heritage House exhibited the latest work of artist Maria Smith and, just up the road, the Bermuda Society of Arts was opening the doors of its new Harbour Gallery. This certainly seems to be a popular move with the public, lending some substance to the claim that the visual arts in Hamilton are flourishing as never before: it's almost like living in a real city.

Maria Smith is an interesting -- and puzzling -- figure in the local art world. Her natural, unschooled talent burst upon the scene only about five years ago, where her facility with the brush was immediately apparent and matched by an uncanny ability to absorb into her own work the styles of other artists. For many painters, and throughout the centuries, this has been a natural path of progression. Five years later I, for one, am unable to predict what style, let alone what genre Maria Smith will finally call her own. In some ways, she has been the victim of her early commercial success -- by no means a singular experience on this tiny island.

While she seems to be concentrating on easy-on-the-eye Bermuda scenes which are as popular with local buyers as with tourists, there is a feeling that she has not so much lost her way, as never found it. This is particularly sad in a painter of such potential.

Viewed overall, in the past few years, Maria Smith has produced work that reveals a fledgling artist of some quality. There springs to mind, for instance, her freesias which were chosen for the Mall Galleries London show in 1991, some spectacular flower studies, and several rural scenes in last year's show. Her watercolours, too, (there are none in this show) reveal a vibrancy which is often missing in her oils.

I would have thought that very few, if any, artists -- especially at the outset of their careers -- are able to sustain the physical, let alone the emotional strain, of presenting three solo shows in as many years. Surely, one show within this time frame, interspersed, perhaps, with a small group exhibit would have better nurtured her talent. As it is, there are a whopping 31 pictures in her "Shorelines and Gardens'' exhibition, all painted in the last twelve months: by the law of artistic averages, it follows that at least one-third do her no justice. Those which, by her own admission, were experimental, should have remained just that, and not included in the show.

There are several glaring problems with draughtsmanship and perspective, most notably in her drawing of the lily pond at Palm Grove.

Several of her shoreline pictures do reveal a new fluency and softness; some of her cloud effects, as in "Horseshoe Bay'' and "Sea and Sky'' confirm this, and there is a real sense of shimmering liquidity in the wide expanse of water in her study of "Mangrove Bay.'' For an artist who is so concerned with colour, however, it is inconceivable that she really sees Bermuda's greenery in such curiously flat terms. Looking at the treatment of foliage in such pictures as "Little House'' and "Atop Cobb's Hill,'' one is reminded of the uniform, darkish and frankly boring shade of green that stretches interminably on either side of America's highways. The eye-popping difference in Bermuda's landscape is that there are seemingly hundreds of variegated shades of green every which way you happen to turn but, in this show, Maria Smith seems either unaware or indifferent to this fact of nature.

When she turns her back on the typical tourist "ooh-aah'' scene, this artist shows every sign of coming into her own. What she needs now is the courage to stick with it. The outstanding example of this is her closely-viewed study of "Water Lilies''; luxuriously brushed, the confident melding of deep and pale pink blooms offset by bold green leaves reveals a wholly unexpected modernity to her more usual realism. There is a similar sense of emotional rapport in her "Royal Palms'' where she captures the quiet elegance of the entrance to this old orange-washed house peeping through the trees at the end of a shallow flight of steps.

Of her shoreline pictures, my personal favourite is "Dusk at Elbow,'' where she evokes the lonely beauty of a now deserted beach through a foreshortened angle of a sand bank strewn with bay grape leaves and evening shadows. "Farm Road, Devonshire'' shares a similar air of beckoning mystery, as a winding earthen path snakes off into a darkened wood.

Another avenue that Mrs. Smith might explore is her feeling for still-life.

"Memories'' hones in on blue and white china and glass arranged on a polished table. While the perspective of the background walls is questionable, her dexterity with the brush is apparent in the way she has captured the sheen of light as it falls on a vase here, and a cup there.

While this show is certainly pleasant in its overall impact, there is, at least for me, a growing conviction that if she is to progress as an artist, Maria Smith needs to spend some time painting purely for herself, rather than what is often an undiscerning market.

Her intrinsic and undoubted talent could only benefit from such an exercise.

-- Patricia Calnan