I love the Palm Court Lounge The Phoenicia Malta. To me it is the most elegant entrance of all hotels in Malta. Lately, Maris Zammit opened her first solo exhibition, Vanishing Vistas there curated with sensitivity by Charlene Vella who curates all exhibitions taking place in this Lounge.  I have been a follower of Maris on Facebook since I became a member. I have always loved her paintings.    I found myself standing before thirty‑three watercolours that felt like small acts of preservation. Maris Zammit's exhibition is her debut solo exhibition - though nothing about it feels tentative. She has, of course, participated in numerous collectives. These are the works of someone who has looked long and hard at the Maltese landscape, and who understands how fragile it has become.

Her story alone is striking. After a successful career in motorsport, she turned to painting in 2000, training under Harry Alden - that steady pillar of Maltese art - and later Anton Calleja. She continued with the Wednesday Art Group, those loyal plein‑air painters who kept on meeting even after Calleja's sessions ended. You can feel that discipline in her work: the quickness of eye, the instinct to catch the light before it shifts, the tenderness of someone who paints outdoors because she wants to be in the world, not merely depict it.

But what moved me most was the quiet urgency beneath the beauty. So many of the places she paints - the lanes, the coastlines, the familiar clusters of stone - are slipping away.  Harmonious streetscapes with which we have been so familiar are changing rapidly and buildings which have been part of our childhood are no more. Standing before her work, I felt that ache. These are not nostalgic scenes; they are warnings wrapped in light. Watercolour, with its translucence and its vulnerability, is the perfect medium. Oils would have given us weight. Watercolour gives us breath - and the sense that what we are looking at might dissolve if we blink.

Some paintings hold the hush of early morning paths; others the restless push of the sea. A few capture those quiet, everyday encounters - a figure walking dogs along a country lane, a solitary person pausing by the shore - moments that remind us that heritage is not only architecture but the way we inhabit our land. Even the more dramatic coastal works, with their foaming waves and distant sailboats, carry a tenderness: the knowledge that this, too, is part of what we stand to lose. I left the exhibition with a familiar mix of gratitude and unease. Gratitude for artists like Maris who record what is disappearing before our eyes; unease because we know how quickly the familiar can be erased. Her paintings are not elegies yet - but they are close. They ask us to look, to remember, and perhaps to hold on a little tighter.

A quiet exhibition, but a necessary one. I walked out into the late afternoon light feeling as though I had been reminded of something important - something that belongs to all of us, and that we are in danger of forgetting.

'Vanishing Vistas'  is open to the public throughout May 2026.

Correction

In  my Diary last Sunday I wrote about the Sip@Listen concert by The Barocco Foundation. It was held at the newly restored apse at St Augustine Priory in Old Bakery street and not St Domenic's.