Elizabeth Haines

“A long slow invitation to see what lies under the surface of the paint”

My work has been influenced over the years by an interest in the relationship between painting, poetry and music. It has also been affected by a temporary injury that forced me to paint with the left hand, a practice I now continue when necessary. Painting with the left hand (and so, we are told, with the right side of the brain) has enabled me to work more freely from memory and imagination.

My work can be seen in a number of galleries in Wales: The Attic Gallery, Swansea, Canfas in Cardigan, Goat Street Gallery in St Davids, The Golden Sheaf Gallery, Narberth, and also in Gallery Q, Dundee. And most recently in the new online Gallery, Studio Cennen.

“Elizabeth’s studio is embedded in the Pembrokeshire landscape, the ancient fields , the wild stony outcrops, the sharp coastline which make Pembrokeshire so different from Breconshire.

Going there is a Narnian Experience…first into the small wooden shed, densely packed with the paraphernalia of an artist but then this opens into a larger space with a great window out on to the landscape and finally through this one enters a great space, I think formerly a cattle shed but now subdivided into fascinating and delightful spaces, for teaching, for playing, for performing for relaxing for studying.

In some ways her paintings are like this too… you can enter them on a simple level, relishing colours and textures, enjoying apparently inconsequential marks, but from these emerge a larger space and deeper forms, sometimes there are hints of mountains and forests, intimations of buildings and trees and the further you go into the picture the more there is to see.

Elizabeth has lived in Pembrokeshire for over 40 years and her work has gradually become more abstract, more suggestive more mysterious.. but she is still working in the great British tradition of the landscape, reading and interpreting nature and returning it to the viewer enriched.”