*** No doubt about it, the Bermuda Society of Arts is certainly putting on shows by the stackful at the moment. The itinerary at both the main gallery and Edinburgh gallery seems to change by the week -- something that artists must find quite demanding.

Alas it's a demand that some members are failing to keep up with, as is plainly obvious from the appalling standard of this shambles of a show.

At the risk of sounding like the Attorney General, perhaps it's time at this point for a little history lesson.

Throughout the ages art students have continually been told to practise, practise, practise their draughtsmanship -- "the common language'' of all artists as Samuel Morse described it.

Why? Well it's my guess that, although not all art depends on good drawing, all art does depend on good observation. Drawing, more than any other medium, reveals an artist's understanding of his subject.

"Drawing will tell you what a man's eyesight is worth,'' the painter W.R.

Sickert said.

It is through drawing that we are best able to judge not only an artist's hand/eye co-ordination but his visual awareness -- his observation skills.

Skills that the artists in this show haven't quite mastered yet. (Who am I kidding -- they're miles away.) Actually that's not quite true. As usual there is a small handful of old reliables, talented, trained artists, who have made some contributions, but that only brings me to the second niggle of the show.

Sublime though his charcoal sketch of a nude might be, two out of the three Dan Dempster drawings -- his rock pool studies -- have been on display so many times before I've lost count. (Although at nearly two thousand bucks a throw is it any wonder he can't get them off his hands?) It's the same story with David Sean Hill's pen and ink study of Crossways Cottage and his beautiful, rich coloured pencil drawings of fish, all of which have been exhibited before in more than one gallery And yet again with Desmond Fountain's etchings. Exquisite though they are, I remember reviewing them in a one-man show of Desmond's at the Windjammer gallery last year.

Now there's nothing wrong with wheeling out the odd masterpiece every now and then, particularly if the work is worth a second look.

But that work shouldn't form the backbone of a show, which is what has happened here. What have we got? Well out of 44 drawings only about 17 are of any merit and nine of these have been on show at least once before in the past 18 months. Hardly worth a trek into Hamilton in the pouring rain, is it? The few exceptions are Nicholas Silk's beautifully controlled study `Shinbone Alley' which contrasts nicely with both Otto Trott's relaxed, fluid `Bermuda Motif 1' and Bruce Stuart's two drawings of the female form.

As for the remainder, well perhaps Jackie Stevenson's work shows a bit of promise, but the rest really isn't worth the paper it's been doodled on.

And how did six of Jennifer McMillan's `drawings' get onto the wall, or for that matter three of Bronwen Pett's sketches? I'm not knocking these people for having a go but I'm damned if I'm going to lie and say their work is any good. No, the criticism lies with the exhibition organisers.

Okay, let everyone have at least one effort entered into the show if you must (although I feel that that policy makes a mockery of any exhibition that claims to be juried and also leads to a degeneration in quality -- at the viewing public's expense) but when more than 80 percent of an exhibition's content is instantly forgettable one has to ask if it's worth putting on that show in the first place.

The society can do and should have done a lot better.

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