For years, British artist Cleo Pettitt has been the woman literally behind many bold, creative backdrops for Gilbert & Sullivan Society productions — including their current show 'Best Little Whorehouse in Texas'.

But today, the sceneographer will be throwing the curtain back on a different side of herself by holding her first ever art exhibition at the Bermuda Society of Arts Gallery (BSOA). It is called 'My Perspective', and it will be her own take on Bermuda and its culture.

"I have done scenery all my life," said Ms Pettitt, who lives in Stratford-Upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, England. "I have done the research, I have read other people's scripts but I have never ever done my own story or my own script.

"If you do your own pictures they are your own. There is nothing else to it. It is what you want to paint out of your own head and what you want to say about the world."

With a laugh, she said she was quite nervous about this new venture, because she was so used to literally working behind the scenes.

"This is really personal," she said. "When someone goes to see a play at City Hall they don't judge you so much. When I first started painting I was told that people in Bermuda would only buy paintings of flora and fauna, but I am not interested in that. Everyone else does it."

Instead, she wanted to bring her own perspective to her art, just as she brought it to her theatrical scenery.

"It is the way I see Bermuda, the mopeds and motorbikes, the planes by the water at the airport. That is not normal. The beautiful shiny trucks. I have some horses in the show. I just see all that stuff, but I don't see anyone else painting it. So I thought, 'right, that is what I am going to paint'."

But she said there was probably still a strong theatrical influence on her paintings.

"I think it is theatrical to put an object in front of a backdrop," said Ms Pettitt. "That is what you are doing with theatre. You want it to give a dramatic impact. I feel like my art is theatrical. It has a kind of drama."

She has been a professional set designer for the last 14 years and has designed sets all over the world from England, to Bermuda to Alaska to Dubai, among other places. She trained at the University of Central England, where she obtained a Bachelors degree and a Masters degree in Scenography.

"It is fun," she said. "I grew up in-Stratford-Upon-Avon. My parents moved there to run a guest house, which is the main trade there. I fell in love with theatre since I was a kid. I used to go to Shakespeare plays all the time, although none of my friends did. I got involved in amateur dramatics, and I got a job when I was 17 at the theatre in Stratford."

She worked early on at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Birmingham Rep Theatre and eventually for theatres in London's West End.

"I started out at the bottom as the person who primed paint," she said. "I worked my way up."

To do a backdrop like the one she recently did for 'Best Little Whorehouse in Texas' requires many hours of planning, research and gallons of paint.

"Those cloths get really heavy," she said. "I spread the cloths right out at the Daylesford Theatre and work on them there. We use to do them at City Hall but you can't do them there anymore because they don't want you getting paint on their new stage. In order to do a theatre backdrop you have to scale it up, do it small first and grid it out. That is what you get trained in when you are scenic artist."

She said what made 'Best Little Whorehouse in Texas' scenery complicated was that some scenes take place inside the whorehouse while others take place outside.

"There is no way that you can have a whorehouse that is movable with a separate outside," she said. "The hardest thing was to try and make it work inside and outside."

Using screening for the doors of the whorehouse, and lighting, the scenery magically gives the illusion of changing without really changing much at all.

"The result is that it is exactly the same house, but psychologically you know those are the inside doors, or the outside doors," she said. "As a scenery artist, you have to work out so many things like that. Last year for 'Oliver!' we had a backdrop of London. For one scene we put in a bridge and you could see London under the bridge. It felt like you were down by the wharf, but we hadn't really removed half the stuff."

She was first brought to Bermuda by director Vanessa Gray to work on the scenery of 'Fiddler on the Roof' in 2003.

"We had done 'Fiddler on the Roof' before in England, and Vanessa Gray said 'I want your set'," said Ms Pettitt. "So she brought me out to do that set again. It was our production and ideas, and there would never be a cross over of audiences."

She said what typified her sets was probably an element of boldness. She likes to make a big statement with scenery.

"I am not one for just putting something in the background," she said. "It is really part of the whole show. I do loads of research for the historical stuff. You use to have to go to the library and get stacks of books, but now you can just go to the Internet. It is amazing how it has changed."

She said one of the scenes she was most proud of was for the play 'Around the World in Eight Days'.

"That was really cool because you literally had to go around the world, and it had to be one stage," she said. "So how do you do that? I made it like a Victorian clock. There was a little train and a lot of little mechanical things. Indicators on the train changed to demonstrate the story had moved to another country."

Ms Pettitt's exhibition is on at the BSOA until November 2.

For more information about the Bermuda Society of Arts exhibition see their website at www.bermudaart.org. For more information about her theatrical work see her website at www.worldstage.co.uk.