This weekend the Bermuda National Gallery (BNG) launches no less than six exhibitions within its City Hall precincts. Two, in particular, will pay tribute to the work of well-known Bermudians: artist Georgine Hill and travel photographer deForest (Shorty) Trimingham.

"We see this as bringing the community together to honour its own," director Laura Gorham says.

"These tributes are the first in what the BNG plans will be a regular feature of future winter shows.

"Georgine, as the first arts teacher in Bermuda's public school system, and as a founding trustee of the gallery, has had an enormous impact on the local arts scene. As a member of the Progressive Group, whose theatre boycott led to desegregation in Bermuda, she has been equally influential from a human rights standpoint. She is a very important person in Bermuda's history, yet her painting, which includes some of the Island's most outstanding portraiture, remains virtually unknown."

Of Mr. Trimingham, Mrs. Gorham says: "He took up photography late in life but developed into one of the Island's most talented exponents of the genre. He is a major artist, and needs to be recognised as such, and it is the job of the National Gallery to make sure that there is a wider awareness and appreciation of the considerable talent and contribution that our senior artists have made over the years."

Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, came from an artistic family. Her mother played piano and organ, and her maternal grandmother was an artist. As a child, she studied dance and music, but particularly loved art, and was always drawing. Visits to art galleries were a regular feature of family life.

She studied sculpture, painting, etching, print making and more at the Massachusetts College of Art. By the time she arrived in Bermuda in 1941 with her husband, professional photographer Hilton Hill, and their infant son, Hilton III, her passion for the arts and culture in general was well developed. She was immediately impressed with the Island's beauty, but it was not until after the birth of the couple's daughter, June, that she began to paint.

After the Second World War Bermuda began to undergo great changes in its social fabric, way of life, and even its small arts community. Among the artists taking up residence here was Canadian artist and sculptor Byllee Lang, whose ultimately legacy was the reredos in the Anglican Cathedral. Miss Lang established her own studio and art school, and taught children and adults of both races. Through Mrs. Hill's friendship with this artist, she too became actively involved in the developing art scene, and along with Sir Stanley Spurling, Mrs. Christine Diel and others, helped to found the Bermuda Art Association. Later, along with Miss Lang, she established the annual exhibition of students' art through the Bermuda Society of Arts, an organisation with which she worked for years, and was at one time vice-president.

Mrs. Hill established the first arts programme in the public school system, in which she taught for over 20 years.

While she has painted landscapes, portraiture has been her fort?, and it is these which will be featured in the BNG exhibition.

"I think people are so interesting," she says. "Once you get interested in a person's face there is beauty in all of them because you start breaking them down into shapes, light and shade. That is how I look at people."

The artist has mostly painted people she knew or who knew her.

"I did it almost as a favour really. I didn't go commercial because I didn't want to be flooded and paint person after person with no inspiration."

Nonetheless, she has accepted a commission to do a portrait of Dr. Otelia Cromwell, the first black to graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts.

"It will be hanging in one of the top colleges in Boston," the artist says proudly.

was introduced to photography while at school in Connecticut by his art teacher, who was also a keen photographer.

He allowed the young Bermudian to take the freshman photography course, and even loaned him his equipment and darkroom facilities. The student was encouraged to look for such elements as repetition and shape, rhythm, texture, light and shade, and instructed to photograph them so often that looking for them became automatic. He was also urged to apply the same formula to other art forms.

"The simple truths he taught me made me appreciate music, art and literature a great deal more," Mr. Trimingham says.

"It is quite different from the way most people who go to photographic school are taught. They learn how to use a camera but don't not much about art. Every photographer should take an art course once a year just to remind him or herself of position and what the eye is looking for. The object of producing something on paper is to make the viewer enjoy it and get something out of it emotionally, not just what is in front of them. If you don't know what your objective is in making a photograph then don't bother with it ? unless you want to do postcards. It's a different approach."

It was not until the former businessman and Minister of Tourism during what he calls its "golden years" retired that he returned to photography. Since then he has taken courses and travelled widely with his wife Dorothy, producing a rich body of images, some 200 of which are included in his book, 'Buddha: The Living Way', the foreword to which was written by His Holiness Dalai Lama. Images from the book are included in his BNG tribute exhibition.

While Mr. Trimingham's photography is highly regarded, he is not a devotee of using the latest, fanciest camera.

"You don't need the most expensive equipment in the world. You can take an interesting, artistic picture with relatively poor equipment," he says. "If you don't have some feeling of how to take a picture that represents your emotions, it doesn't matter what camera you have. What matters is what's in your head."

And as viewers will discover, Mr. Trimingham not only has plenty in his head, but is a true artist when it comes to conveying it.

Extensive profiles of both Mrs. Hill and Mr. Trimingham can be found on the BNG web site: www.bng.bm/current.html All six exhibitions open to the public on Saturday, January 31. For full details see 'Exhibitions' in today's Bermuda Calendar.