This summer, Sue Stephenson was preoccupied with boats.

Sails in particular captured her fancy: she watched as they moved about the harbours here, and googled images for closer inspection.

Then she set to work painting.

Point of Sail, her collection of 30 acrylics she painted using a palette knife, is now on display at the Bermuda Society of Arts.

The exhibit was prompted by an unexpected reaction to a piece she submitted as part of a general show with a marine theme a few months ago.

“The curator asked if I was putting anything in myself. I told her that I don't do boats but she encouraged me to do something abstract.”

Ms Stephenson “had a go” and submitted one painting which, to her delight, sold.

“As it was my first attempt at a sailboat, I was pleasantly surprised to have received a certificate of excellence by the judges. This did indeed prompt me to explore the subject matter further and hence, the idea and title of this show came to fruition.”

Creating the work did have its challenges, she added.

“I had to make them pretty accurate to make them look a bit real. So that was a real challenge. They took a long time.”

Point of Sail is the artist’s fourth show.

“I hope you enjoy these new pieces as much as the fun and enjoyment I had in creating them,” she said. “It feels like I have come full circle using both brush and palette knife again as I did with oils and feels so good to be holding a brush again and being in control of where the paint is put on the canvas.”

As described by the Bermuda Society of Arts, she moved here from London, England in 1983 and was “immediately drawn to the beautiful colours of the island and the shoreline”.

“She started dabbling in pastels and later moved on to oils, under the guidance of Maria Smith. After a few years, some of her students branched off and painted regularly on their own. Sue was one of these people and painted for many years with Peter Hebberd and Grant Hall in Peter’s garage.”

Added Ms Stephenson: “In 1990 me and my fiance at that time, went to France and went to draw where Monet’s gardens are [in Normandy]. I took a million pictures, and I painted them.”

For years the paintings hung in Take Five, a restaurant in Hamilton.

“I hadn't had any training or anything. I guess I missed my calling,” she laughed.

In 2018 Ms Stephenson moved from oils to acrylic pours, where the paints are mixed with a thinning medium to achieve the desired consistency and then poured on to canvas. Following on “successful shows displaying her work with this medium”, she moved in a new direction this year and began “experimenting with abstract art, using palette knife and brush”.

That effort was displayed in The City, an exhibit that ran at the BSoA in February.

“I was just doing abstracts. I didn't have the title of the show in mind. I just started doing that style and a lot of them looked like city lines, like cityscapes. So we came up with the title, The City.

“That’s my background. I’ve just kind of been dabbling ever since. I haven't had any formal training, only what I've learnt with Maria. But I have continued to explore painting using palette knife and brush, which I find exciting and freeing, never really knowing where the next stroke will take me.”

As with all her previous shows, Bermuda offered obvious inspiration for the exhibit that is now on display.

She credits Ms Smith for that early start.

“She was a really, really good painter; up there with Sheilagh Head. We just used to take a picture and we would paint it in her kitchen — dead laid-back.

“She’d come over and say, ‘That’s right’ or ‘That bit might need a bit of work’. But in a way it was really ourselves, teaching ourselves with her guidance.”

Her hope is that people enjoy viewing her art as much as she enjoyed creating it.

“I think they can see Bermuda in a different light, the abstract side of it. One of them I called Raft Up. It's a big one, six by four, the main one. Everyone that saw it, my friends and the people that trickled through on opening night, said it reminded them of a regatta, or the tall ships.

“What I like is that people take from it what they think they see — for some people it might look like tall ships, someone else sees it as a raft up. And I did one and [called it] Race Start because they were just all lined up and someone said that to them it looked like Gombeys. So everyone looks and sees what they see and that's why I like doing them in abstract form because they seem to look at them for longer to try and see what they see in them.”

Point of Sail is on display at the Bermuda Society of Arts through November 7. For more information, visit bsoa.bm