The show of new works by the Group of Five at the Bermuda Society of Arts Gallery at the City Hall is notable for both strength and variety. Of the five the only work I found mildly disappointing was that of Katherine Dyer.

This was because of what I have learned to identify in my self as a discomfort factor, so I stopped and took some time to analyse what it was that induced this discomfort.

It broke down into several parts. There was inconsistency in her treatment of her medium oils on canvas. There was heavy impasto juxtaposed with smooth sweeping surfaces.

This had a purpose in Low Tide, Coral Beach where the contrast between the impasto of the foreground rocks and the calm sunny day of the middle ground and distance worked quite well. In the seascapes the contrasts were less felicitous.

In these also the intensity of the blues vied for dominance with the idiosyncrasies of paint application. The angle of view in several of the seascapes was also inconsistent, leaving me with a sense of imbalance.

By natural law water finds its own level and needs to be flat even when roiled with turbulence. It is only not flat when it?s pouring over a cliff or through rapids. Thus for me the overall impression was unsettling.

Laura Bell?s acrylics displayed a passionate intensity, an exacting study, and a wide versatility of interest. Her fascination with the bare branches of deciduous trees was the subject of various interpretations.

Frozen and Burnt were obvious contrasts, the first cold in colour scheme, the second hot. So too were Blown Away and Stripped, the former a small tracery of branches, the latter a large canvas of barren, rather wispy limbs.

A series of three intense, close up studies, Red Rose, was so sensuous and lush one felt one could almost dive in and nestle between the petals. Treescape depends for its effect on a subtle impasto, although the division of colour is somewhat extreme. Sea Escape is an underwater scene similarly fascinated with branches.

It is rescued from something close to monotony by its rendering of the light source.

Ms Bell?s star turn, however, was a triptych, Grounded. Grace. Continuity, each subtly coloured panel enhanced by an oriental ideograph and given a soothing aura of mystery to enhance the intent behind the title.

The hanging work in the show is completed by a surprisingly coordinated series of seventeen more or less figurative works by Kok Wan Lee and gallery director Peter Lapsley.

Kok Wan Lee has moved a little away from his customary swirling abstractions and starts off with a series of four figuratively derived works in watercolour tied together by a sense of both mystery and dislocation.

Their title, Searching, might have as well been Strangers in the Night. His shadowy figures of indeterminate sex interacting in a strong chiaroscuro seem as much repelled by as attracted to one another.

These are followed by two works in oil pastel called MEETING I & II in which the more abstracted figures seem to meet more intimately.

In Meeting I & II the figures are geometrically abstracted in contrasting black and orange, the second and more obscure being in more intense hues and more extreme abstraction.

It is possible to read sexual union into these abstractions without there being even the remotest suggestion of obscenity or even eroticism.

Kok Wan Lee?s final series of three, Posing, are rendered in a swirling linear charcoal treatment.

They are of zaftig nudes in louche poses about which there is a distinct sense of disintegration, not only physical, but also moral. They hark back to some of the work of the artists of the Weimar Republic.

The continuation of Peter Lapsley?s series Crowd of One comes almost as a relief. These are intense studies representing the loneliness of people in crowds and are informed by a strong feeling of alienation.

This sense of alienation is intensified in Crowd of One, #5?, a diptych that isolates one half of a vast lonely crowd from the other. The most dramatic and, perhaps, the most topical, is of three hooded figures with heads bowed.

It is distressingly evocative of the grainy television images of hostages about to be beheaded by Islamic extremists.

This show is particularly distinguished by its large number and variety of sculptural works. Also by Peter Lapsley are Sephas and Nephesh, the former a copper painted life mask cast in some form of papier mach? mounted in a wooden octagon and pierced with copper rods with lead finials.

Nephesh is a highly successful work very much dependent for its effect on carefully directed strong light. It consists of three building blocks of local stone, the first pierced through with the characteristic Lapsley human shape.

The Second, seen through the first, has the same human shape partially hollowed out so that only a rim of the silhouette of the figure pierces completely through the stone, allowing a glimpse of the rough surface of the third stone.

The effect of the lighting falling on the striated surfaces of the stones while leaving the hollowed out shapes in near darkness is remarkable. The far side of the third stone has a similar excavated shape filled with shards of black mirror glass.

Stretching through the entire gallery are a dozen or so of the richly varied small sculptures of Julie Hastings-Smith.

These vary from straightforward and lifelike renderings of aquatic fauna, a seahorse, a squid and a lobster, through exotic botanical abstractions, Pods and Skeleton.

These are interspersed with the humorous including the delightful Pineapple Bird, a mildly ostrich like bird the plumage of which seems to have been parented by a pineapple.

Three mobiles, somewhat on the fussy and overly delicate side, reminded me of the time long gone by when Calder was the art sensation du jour. To me mobiles are old hat and not in need of a retro fit.

This artist?s real talent emerges most strongly in her radically elongated human figures.

Two, Folds and Draped are female nudes whose apparent loneliness is emphasised by the relevant pieces of cloth.

More Than Just Good Friends is of two unsexed figures in affectionate proximity but nevertheless alienated from one another by their separately directed gazes.

The emotional effect of these works perfectly complemented those of Kok Wan Lee and Peter Lapsley and added to the sense of cohesion of that end of the gallery. This is a show of considerable quality and more than considerable impact. It is well worth a visit.