Egg tempera and triptychs are what make up the first show of the season at the Masterworks Foundation.

Masterworks? artist-in-residence Donald Meyer?s exhibition, ?Tucker?s Town?, opens tonight in the West Gallery.

Mr. Meyer has been visiting Bermuda since 1986. Although he has spent much time researching many of the great artists who have passed through our shores, this is his first time showing on-Island.

He is a former accountant who always had an interest in art and his skills are self-taught.

Mr. Meyer is vice president of The Philadelphia Sketch Club, America?s oldest artist organisation, and his work is housed in numerous museums, universities and prestigious private collections.

While here he has had the pleasure of working with numerous school children. He gave two lectures at the Bermuda National Gallery, one entitled ?Spring 1917: Hartley and Demuth at the St. George?s Hotel? and ?The Bermuda Effect?, in which he sought to show that there was more to the Island than little pink cottages for artists.

?I don?t think that people realise what it is, but it clears out your brain,? he said.

?And there is a clarification that you make when you come here. You have a reckoning and somehow things come to order.

?It helps me very much as an artist by doing and seeing what I want to see and getting down to the bottom of things.

?Somehow Bermuda makes you realise about the essentials.?

His triptych of landscapes is entitled ?The Triptych Tucker?s Town: The Mark and its Metaphor?, based on, among other things, horizons.

?I basically get up every morning and just before sunrise there is a quiet period and this is absolutely thrilling to me,? he said.

The pieces in the triptych are three, six-and-a-half square feet paintings. Plus there are 12 other pieces in the show and some things that he painted in 1992.

Unlike some artists who don an apron or special painting clothes, Mr. Meyer looks like a doctor outside of the office.

?I found that I ruined a lot of clothes with paint and especially with egg tempura, because it is powdered colour and sometimes it blows like dust,? he said.

?I discovered pictures from the Sketch Club of old artists back in the 1800s and they all wore long smocks. The reason was that in those days everyone wore a shirt and tie and jackets and they wore these long smocks right up to the neck.

?So, I realised that they were cassocks and that is what I have been wearing all this time and every time I do another triptych I wear another cassock.

?I have a red one, a black one, and now that I am here in Bermuda I have a white one and I will wear them to the opening and of course they have the colours of the paintings on them.?

The process of making egg tempera is a simple, yet old one, said Mr. Meyer.

?You crack the egg and then you dip it back and forth between the two halves to separate the yolk from the white,? Mr. Meyer said.

?The yolk is left and you put it on a piece of paper towel and roll it around a little to dry off the rest of the white. Then you actually poke it with a knife and the sac breaks and you put it into the jar. Then you take that with the same amount of water in a jar and about four egg yolks will make about four ounces of medium. You then put your pigment into it.

?It is a very simple thing to make and I describe it is as the oldest medium there is. It was what they used in the caves and it goes way beyond medieval. In the earliest existing paintings it still exists, because paint wears away and some (with egg tempera) date back to 100 AD and it looks like it was painted yesterday because egg tempera doesn?t go brown.

?It is very, very clear although it looks yellow in the jar, but when you put it on the surface it goes clear and when you put the colour into it, of course the colour is there.

?It is a very interesting medium because you can control how much colour goes into it. You can literally put a swath of it on and blow the pigment on it and that is how they painted the caves in France 17,000 years ago. They blew the carbon black out of a hollowed out bone.?

The opening reception is at 5.30 p.m. until 7 p.m. and the exhibition closes on March 24.