12.

Rarely can a shotgun wedding have had such a happy ending.

For the ground-breaking collaboration between the Masterworks Foundation and the Bermuda Society of Arts has created a synergy which can only be good news for the arts scene on the Island.

The current show at the BSoA -- showcasing the work of artists featured in Masterworks' two-year Artists Up Front....Street -- is, it must be said, drawn from unsold works, which could suggest to the cynic it's only the work no-one wanted.

But that, it must also be said, is not the case, although I assume sculptor Chesley Trott and the irrepressible Will Collieson have, justly, been enjoying good sales recently.

Collieson -- a natural show stealer -- is represented by the witty and thought-provoking Bear With Me One Moment.

A threadbare -- so to speak -- bound hand and foot sits on a tiny Queen Anne-style chair with a black-and-white snapshot of what appears to be a young Collieson across its chest.

Ah, well -- we're all prisoners of our childhood to a greater or lesser extent, I suppose.

He also provides a stark yet subtle commentary on the fall of the Soviet star with, yes, Falling Star.

A dull and grimy rendition of the Stars and Stripes is turned into a neat social commentary with a large and tarnished cutout red star tumbling down the work.

It points up the grim symbiotic relationship between the two superpowers. The States and the USSR needed each other -- if only as a focus for hatred.

Collieson's Come In is evocative of the slightly shabby-genteel aura of the old-style English seaside town and rowing boats for hire, now sidelined by cheap package holidays to Spain.

The sun-bleached and peeling blue-and-white planks bearing the number five hint at decay and surrealistic touches are added by a tiny hand -- not waving but drowning, I suspect -- and a fish bisected by a piece of wood.

Anyone familiar with the window displays of a certain Front Street store will recognise some of the touches in How Does Your Garden Grow.

The series of mixed media works on a common theme uses found objects like pieces of pipe, feathers, wood and buttons, to create rich, rust-red washed and thought-provoking art.

A world away from Collieson is James Toogood, a US artist who has made a big impact with his impressions of Bermuda.

His Shinbone Alley, St. George's, is a homage to a view of the same street by Pleissner.

But his precisely-rendered watercolour gives a new slant on light and shade, while cars, a cycle and a little pile of rubble updates the picture without being too intrusive.

William Gringley is a young artist of promise -- but his Enigma is a wee bit heavy-handed for this reviewer's taste.

It is beautifully executed -- but his head over Jobson's Cove framed in quasi-religious style by two robe-draped bodies with raised hands where the head should be echoes the jangling guitars of dinosaur rock and the rather pretentious symbolism-loaded album covers of '70s theme albums.

But the lad is versatile, I'll give him that. And his collages on the theme of the Gulf War have a light and clever touch that says a lot to us children of Ted Turner and the CNN age. He also managed to incorporate bits of Demi Moore in one, so he gets my vote straight away.

Lisa Quinn's City Blues is an eloquent commentary on the invisible dividing line between Front Street and back of town.

Her foreground of a blue-and-white balcony is dominated by the grimy and peeling paint of the building brooding over it. It ain't inner-city anywhere -- but things don't have to get that bad, surely? The BSoA -- with its comparative acres of space -- is made for a sculptor like Chesley Trott, favourably reviewed in this newspaper recently, despite the cramped space of Masterworks.

But not much is on show and what there is jammed up against a free-standing display, making it impossible to walk around and admire his fine eye of line and form. Masterworks has an excuse. BSoA doesn't.

Jason Semos' oil and acrylic screen is a nod in the direction of the pop art of the '60s, depicting scenes of life from the US of some decades ago -- even a Warhol-style Coke can gets a look-in -- and draws from the Weimar Republic with a dash of '30s Soviet poster art.

But it's a curiously flat piece of work and his clever-clever tromp d'oeil don't satisfy either.

However -- Sharon Wilson's work for the children's book The Day GoGo Went to Vote is marvellous. Betsey Mulderig's Honeymoon examines Bermuda's role in the sex war, while her Mourning the Moon, with a tiny but sinister bulldozer on the horizon, warns against the perils of unrestricted development. All are well worth viewing.

Graham Foster's almost schizoid work is always worth examination, while Kathy Draycott and Mark Emmerson's platinum photographic prints are a triumph.

The Lady Waddington -- for so she is styled -- is also represented by a single watercolour, Home Before the Storm. It's very pretty, very pale and oh, so English.

And I refer readers to Eveyln Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and the cosmopolitan and exotic Anthony Blanche's comments on the impact of the English on art.

RAYMOND HAINEY ART REVIEW REV ART