Although he is one of Bermuda's finest and most painterly of painters, Chris Marson has never had his own show.

Now the Bermuda Society of Arts has put that situation to rights by choosing him as the featured artist to open its new Harbour Gallery.

Fifteen of his distinctive watercolours have gone on view in the new, three-room Pitts Bay Road gallery, just acquired by the Society as an additional outlet for their members' work and which opened this weekend.

Mr. Marson is refreshingly down-to-earth about the business of painting, and modest to the point where he says he has never really considered holding a one-man show. He sets the tone for his first-ever interview by quoting Canadian painter, Ken Lougheed, "If I could talk about it, I wouldn't have done all these damn paintings!'' In spite of his reticence, Mr. Marson's track record is impressive. Besides showing regularly with the Society of Arts and Dockyard exhibitions, his work is also in demand in several galleries in New England. In 1991 he was one of the 13 artists selected to take part in the summer show of the Royal Society of British Artists at the Mall Galleries in London. His paintings have been shown in Bermuda's National Gallery and he is one of the few living artists featured in Masterworks' recently published book on their Bermudiana Collection.

The Department of Tourism has twice purchased his work for auction at charity benefits in the US and, this year, the Premier chose one of his watercolours for his Christmas card. Finally, a Chris Marson watercolour was chosen as one of the first two paintings to be purchased by the Society of Arts for its projected Contemporary Collection.

It is not hard to see why his work is so instantly recognised as being quintessentially Bermudian -- and could never be mistaken for the work of any other artist. With a few, seemingly simple strokes, brushed in cool low-keyed colours, he captures that sense of place which is the hallmark of the true landscape artist.

This is a quality that was immediately recognised by Georgiana Druchyk, director of America's oldest art society, the Copley Society of Boston, when she juried a Bermuda Society of Arts show earlier this year.

"He has achieved a mastery over his brush that allows him to express himself with utter simplicity -- his `handwriting' is very distinctive,'' she noted at the time.

This assessment is one that might possibly amuse Mr. Marson. Having obtained a degree in fine arts from the University of Manitoba, he stresses that he specialised in graphic design.

"In fact, I was basically told that I didn't know how to paint.'' It was not until about 11 years ago that he took up his paintbrushes again -- and, even then, it was to work in oil and acrylics.

"For a couple of years, I was doing a whole bunch of really bad paintings.

When I switched to watercolours, it took a long time to get used to working in that medium, but since then, I've never looked back.'' In spite of that setback, Mr. Marson has been painting for most of his life, recalling that when he was about eight years old, he saw artist Mary Powell's studio opposite Paget Marsh and announced from the back of the car, "That's what I want to be.'' Today, he is a prolific painter who tends to paint the same scenes over and over again. The reason behind this, however, is perhaps more prosaic than those governing Monet's hay-stacks and water lilies.

"Spanish Point is very close to town so I can go there in my lunch hour and paint a picture,'' he explains.

In spite of some fellow artists who tell him, "But there's nothing to paint out there!'' Mr. Marson says the only problem for him lies in the naming of his paintings.

"It gets difficult when all you can say, basically, that we've now reached `Spanish Point No. 68'! But the truth is, the more you paint a place, the more you see. You really get the feel and atmosphere, you see the differences in the quality of the light and, every day, you do see something that is quite new.'' Warming to this theme, he goes on to explain how he approaches each painting.

"I may go out there and look at the sky, or the water, or it may be a very grey, dull day and then perhaps it would be the boats that catch my attention.

My major decision is always about where the horizon is going to be, and I decide what really interests me -- and then it's all very fast. The basics are down on paper in under an hour -- and the longest part of that is waiting for my washes to dry. I may work on it some more, afterwards, but if I haven't got the core by then, I never will have.'' Admitting that he carries a small painting kit with him wherever he goes ("even when I go swimming''), Mr. Marson feels it is essential to paint just about every day.

"If I paint solidly each day over a period of time, there is an increased fluency. I suppose it's like doing scales on a piano every day.'' This, he says, sometimes requires the discipline that forces the artist to pick up his paintbrush when he least feels like it.

"I have done some of my best paintings when I started out in a bad, or a non-painting mood. Basically, I can't imagine life now, without painting. If I don't paint for a few days, I get twitchy and in the end, my wife will say, `For goodness sake, go out and get on with some painting!' Part of the fascination is that, however much you paint, you never know how it's going to turn out.'' At the moment, Chris Marson feels he is going through a "new'' stage.

"There is a lot more colour, stronger colours, in my work at the moment. I think I need to work on edges for a while and try to get the values right. I'm working at bigger, stronger shapes with more structure in them. When Peter Peterson (past president of the Royal Society of British Artists) was out here, he told me my paintings needed to be more constructed and I didn't have the foggiest idea of what he meant -- but I do now! But with painting, you have to be ready for certain information, otherwise it won't do you any good.

One of the great things about painting is that it's an open-ended thing. You never really reach the point where you can't improve. It's a growing thing, and you learn only as you go along.'' Asked to sum up his style, he replies that he feels it is a curious combination of the big shapes of the "California'' style, but without their bright, bold colours.

"My colouration is very English, so it's a cross-fertilisation of big American, and early English watercolours!'' Noting that he was made to do "a lot'' of drawing at University, Mr. Marson emphasises that, in his opinion, drawing is the backbone of art. "That is where the structure is. I draw with a brush -- but that comes from the fact that I can draw. An awful lot of artists cannot draw.'' It is perhaps this highly developed gift which, more than anything else, lends the understated fluidity and inborn sense of rhythm that characterises a Marson painting.

He enlarges on the importance of drawing by adding, "You have to be prepared, in the first few years of painting, for a lot of `misses'. For every ten or 20 that `miss', you may get one that sings. Gradually, after years of practice, the hits increase over the misses, so that eventually, even your bad ones are competent. But a painting has to communicate. A technically perfect painting often doesn't work. If the artist and the painting are `talking' to each other, that quality will come through. If not, you may as well forget it, as a work of art.'' Full of quiet humour, Chris Marson reveals some of the pitfalls awaiting the artist who insists on doing all of his landscape paintings on location.

"People often come up behind me and ask, `Are you a real artist?' Then the next question is, can they sit and watch. Painting is so draining, and you are so totally concentrated that, half the time, you're not even aware of people watching you. I don't really mind. In fact, there was one guy who asked me what I thought was a very good question. This was, `How do you get the colours not to run together?' After we'd cleared that away he asked me a whole lot more, and I ended up giving him a painting lesson! When I told him it took at least a couple of hundred paintings before you start to paint properly, he said, "Well, I guess it's like anything else. It's no use unless you practise!'' Chris Marson's success finds him anywhere but resting on his artistic laurels.

"If anything, it gets harder, because the more you know, the more critical you get, and the less satisfied -- even with stuff you've only done a year or two ago. But it's difficult, anyway, to be objective about your own work.

People sometimes come up and point at something in my painting and say, `I really like that bit' and it's something I've never even noticed!'' Even when he does what he feels to be a good painting, his reaction, he says, is often one of disbelief.

"Now how did I do that? And when I finish a really good one I think, `Is that it? Can I ever do it again?' I can often feel if a picture is working as I paint it, because it somehow feels big on the page -- it has a larger presence. The ones that don't work are dropping away on the page.'' He pays tribute to art teacher Mrs. Jean Rodriguez, explaining that as Saltus Grammar School did not, at the time, offer art lessons in the senior school, he decided to do `O' and `A' levels on his own.

"So I studied with her -- she was the one who got me on my way. I owe her a lot.'' Chris Marson is also full of praise for the Bermuda Society of Arts.

"They have been very helpful to me and have regularly hung my work. When I first took half a dozen pictures in, I was so excited when they accepted them.

Then I went back to have a look at them a couple of days later, and asked them why they had taken one down. I couldn't believe it when they told me they'd sold it.'' WATERCOLOUR MASTER -- Bermudian artist Chris Marson with "Chilly Morning,'' featured at the opening of the Bermuda Society of Arts' new Harbour Gallery.