Degrees of separation are minimal in Bermuda. Dan DeSilva has drawn attention to that with Align and Intersect, his entry in this year’s Charman Prize.

The piece is now on display in the Rick Faries Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. Fans of Mr DeSilva’s art might think it familiar.

“It’s essentially a follow on from the last Charman Prize entry I did two years ago, which essentially was kind of a proof-of-concept piece. It was quite small, and I always felt I wanted to expand the composition, push it a lot larger,” he said.

“So basically what you see is the end result of playing with that initial idea, expanding it in size and also in structure and composition as well.”

This year the Charman Prize asked artists to consider what it means to be Bermudian.

The answer came easily to Mr DeSilva, an art teacher at Warwick Academy.

“As Bermudians, we need to accept that we are all connected. Our lives on island align and intersect,” he wrote in the artist statement that accompanies his work.

“We exist in the composition that is Bermuda, and depend on each other's existence whether we like it or not.

“If we take one part of Bermuda out of our composition, it is thrown out of balance.

“The iconography of Bermuda tends to be downplayed by outsiders as 'tourist art', when the imagery we represent is our identity and our 'local seen’.”

His love of art began while he was a student at Elliot Primary School. There, he had the good fortune of being taught art by Mrs Raynor who “was definitely a very big influence”.

At Warwick Academy, he found Mr Kulessa equally encouraging.

“Those two are the main reasons why I decided to go into teaching myself,” Mr DeSilva said.

Once he started working he continued painting, using his free times after school and on weekends to create, exhibiting the pieces in group and solo shows and also alongside his wife, Deanne DeSilva.

“I particularly do lots of plants and trees and architectural forms as well, because that's always something that stood out to me as a Bermudian, growing up here and appreciating being here – just the climate, the way light works,” he said.

“My typical work tends to be representational although I always put an almost graphic design quality into my paintings.

“For the Charman Prize I played with the device of windows and shutters as compositional elements and then in the background, symbolically, you've got sky and the ocean and the idea being that I've broken it into bands of colour.”

The work is a take on a style popularised by Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter recognised as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

“I always appreciated Mondrian and his simplicity of structure and composition and I was always drawn into using a line and lining things up and making sure that one object relates to another one in that same painting,” Mr DeSilva said.

He’s pleased that Align and Intersect allowed further development of Windows and Shutters, his 2021 work that displayed as part of the Charman Prize.

“Even if you look at Mondrian’s work, each piece is not really that unique to the next so I think in some ways, it might be a dead end.

“I'd like to play with it a little bit more and see if I could get a few more compositions out of it or at least play with the concept a bit more but definitely, right now I'm quite happy with how it developed out of that initial one two years ago.”

Mr DeSilva’s last solo show was in 2016. A busy life and the restraints of the pandemic “made it very hard to buckle down and get a show together”.

Exhibits such as the Charman Prize present a wonderful opportunity although each comes with the chance of rejection.

“It’s kind of embarrassing if you put in that much work and you're not accepted, but whenever I enter any of these things, I realise there’s the chance that the curator or the judges or whoever makes the choices might not feel it fits in,” he said.

“I appreciate being selected and I see that as a privilege not as an expectation.”

He makes a point of encouraging his art students to consider “their work in a critical way”.

“[In my case] I definitely think there's been a development over time. With my students, I get them to compare the first year of GCSE to when they're getting ready for their exam two years later.

“And when they look through their workbook, or they look at the work they've done, hopefully they can see, ‘Oh, wow, I didn't realise it had come this far’.”

He’s done the same for himself, often flicking through a collection of work that dates back to when he began selling prints of his art at Harbour Nights in 2000.

“I've kept a binder of all the paintings I've done and sold, as well as the paintings I still have and it's really interesting when I flip through that binder to see exactly how my approach has changed and how each work seems to get a little more complicated or push me a little bit further,” Mr DeSilva said.

“It is nice when you have that feeling, when you come through that, and that's why it's important to do shows.

“Because if you're not putting together a body of work on a regular basis, then there isn't any movement forward in your ability or your development of concept.”

• The Charman Prize is on display at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art until March 31. For more information, visitmasterworksbermuda.org/charman-prize/