Worlds Apart is the title of Sue Stephenson’s exhibit tonight at the Bermuda Society of Arts — a huge step for her as an artist. Although she has shown her work “many times” before, she has never attempted to fill the City Hall Gallery’s largest exhibition space. Twenty-four of her paintings are on display in Worlds Apart.

“My show will be the first time exhibiting in the Onions Gallery which I am very excited about although my first thought was, ‘That’s an awful lot of space to fill!’,” Ms Stephenson said.

The minor panic got her thinking about “space, expanse, vastness and large canvases”. Before she knew it, a theme was born.

To the abstract idea she introduced “different textures” similar to the way in which Picasso used house paint and a “palette knife brush and wedge to get the desired effects”.

“Painting on a large canvas is extremely freeing ― to have such a large blank space to fill and let the imagination fly ― although slightly daunting as well.

“I am hoping my pieces will spark the imagination of the viewer,” Ms Stephenson said.

Some of her paintings are as large as 6ft by 5ft. They are bigger than those she typically creates, with their size encouraged by the space she had to fill in the Onions Gallery.

According to the Bermuda Society of Arts, the gallery is “pleased to be showing Sue’s latest works”.

“She has exhibited her work at the gallery since 2019, her first two exhibiting works with the acrylic pour technique and her more recent shows, The City, Point of Sale and Dream a Little Dream where she exhibited pure abstracts using acrylic with palette knife and brush,” a spokesperson said.

“We are excited to host her latest show ― a display of large abstract canvases with the use of bright, vivid colours and rich textures adding to her pieces of work.

“For the first time, Sue has experimented with the drip and splatter method and has produced some very interesting pieces on a large scale.”

Although “interested in art and drawing from a very early age” Ms Stephenson didn’t start painting until she moved to Bermuda from England in the early 1980s.

Completely self-taught. she started experimenting with acrylic pours fairly early on in her artistic journey.

“I had three shows doing acrylic pours where you mix it with the floetrol and you shift the canvas to get your desired effect. Then I went on to use just acrylic and I got into abstract and just started doing abstract pictures,” the artist said. “I've had a few shows depicting different themes.

“This time, I was walking around the gallery space and decided I really needed big canvases to make it work. And then I just started picking my colours and doing the abstracts.”

She started painting in February and finished her last piece only a week ago, fitting her art in whenever she could find the space outside her full-time job as a legal secretary.

Aside from her family “and a couple of friends”, no one has seen her most recent work.

“I'm always nervous before a show, because I like [what I’ve created] and you always want people to like your work,” she said. “But I’m excited as well, because I've never been in the main gallery before and it's quite an achievement, I think, not having been trained as an artist, and not doing it full time.”

Her work at the BSoA has previously shown in its smaller spaces ― in Studio A and B and the Edinburgh Gallery.

“When I was walking around the gallery I thought, I'm really going to have to do some big pieces. I do abstract [work] and I did a couple of pieces, and they kind of looked pretty ‘spacey’.

“I used bright colours and some of them are splashes, some of them are drips. With one of them I’d dumped paints and it formed like a circle and another circle and the idea just came up ― Worlds Apart,” she said.

She decided to give her pictures abstract titles as she wanted to allow people the freedom to interpret her work for themselves.

“I didn’t want people to think, ‘Well it doesn't look like that to me’,” Ms Stephenson said.

“I've got one that looks like it has little gems in it. And I'm calling that one, Let's Explore. Another one is Stay Close. I'm trying to think of titles that will make people think, think about the [image].”

• Worlds Apart opens at 5pm tonight in the Onions Gallery at Bermuda Society of Arts, The City Hall Arts Centre, 17 Church Street, Hamilton and runs until September 17