I hope that there is room for a second opinion of the Charman Prize Exhibition currently on view at Masterworks Gallery. I am referring to Charles Zuill's Thursday, February 18 review of the show.

I appreciate Dr. Zuill's opinion and have read many of his reviews. He has a charming way with words as he leads you around a room, commenting on the line, colour or overall design of many individual pieces in shows that some art critics might just dismiss as amateur.

Usually I hightail it out of New York to New Jersey where I have an opportunity to drive a car on open roads, but I was snowed into New York City one Saturday in February and went to the Outsiders Art Fair, a fair I had heard about for many years but never attended. Essentially, it is a show of artists with little academic art training. There was beautiful lyrical tempera on rice paper work by Christine Sefolosha, an untrained Swiss artist who married, moved and responded to the mysticism of the South African environment. You might recognise the name; her son played basketball for the Chicago Bulls. Or, the boro farmer kimonos from the north of Japan. Cotton was so scarce in that part of the country that every two inch scrap was sown and layered onto existing kimonos as a testament to the love of materials and practicality. It's not that the work in that fair was particularly innovative or mystical or simply fabulous but the dealers and the crowd were so animated, true devotees.

It occurred to me that our reactions to art are a function of our exposure to reproductions of the canon of art history. We are trained to think what is good based on how much of it we have seen before. Much of this art had never been reproduced before; none of it had appeared or will ever appear in a survey of American art or even contemporary art. The only reproductions exist in the individual gallery brochures.

And perhaps that is what Mr. Zuill is responding to in the Charman Show. Many of the artists are untrained. When I looked at the show, I divided the work visually into three categories: one, those artists one sees all the time with entries in their recognisable style; two, those artists one sees all the time with entries they seemed to tailor for this show; and three, the largest group, unfamiliar names with little or no academic art training beyond high school. In fact, some of the pieces are very similar to work in the high school division of the show at the Bermuda Society of Arts. This is not a criticism.

I am not familiar with the Bermuda College art programme, but know that students in any discipline spend the last two years of a four-year programme experimenting and developing themselves beyond the required courses. More power to Mr. Charman and Masterworks that they provided funds and a venue (and a catalogue!) to display every single piece that was entered. Each visual voice is important; this is what Bermuda creates.

In August, I attended the Masterworks opening of the artwork of the prisoners at Westgate and did a workshop there later in the week. The inmates asked me over and over: "How many people were there, what did they say, which work did they like best?"

I was talking to Otto Trott at Christmas and I asked him why he painted in his studio from photographs and not outside in the, to me, more purist en plein air technique. He told me that he was interested in painting the lives of Bermudians and that he couldn't capture that standing with his easel on the side on the road.

It's not as if Masterworks does not have an eye for art history. The exquisite mat and frame of the Georgia O'Keefe drawing alongside the work of Henry Moore, George Ault and Naval Lieutenant in the adjacent Rick Faries Gallery sits squarely in the best curatorial tradition of highlighting an aspect of an established collection.

I think what bothered me the most was the fact that Dr. Zuill objected to every entry being hung without being edited as acceptable or not acceptable. I teach art in a public high school but don't grade the work. I only have two grades: done and undone. Each semester, I show my principal my course outline before I send it home to the parents of my students. I sense the principal wince when he reads that part although he has never corrected me. Isn't it the same with a show of this nature? Every teacher knows after one drawing assignment which three students out of 30 have that magical, untouchable sense of 3-D form and understanding of how those forms relate in space. Why reward the same people over and over for the same expression?

I understand that Mr. Charman hesitated to include Guluzar Ritchie's cyanotype and am glad to see he was persuaded otherwise. Considering that museums are public spaces and that Masterworks has an active young people's education department, the installation is appropriate. Many of the works deal with conservative themes that have long been resolved, or not. Reading Guluzar's writing on the work causes you to wonder about the emotional context of the artist. Including the artists' photos in the catalogue makes irrelevant artists' bios. The artwork is the background of their minds.

I visit Bermuda a few times a year and am, therefore, an outsider myself. I apologise in advance for any misconceptions I hold.

Pamela Perman is an art teacher, reviewer and frequent visitor to Bermuda.