'The path is made by walking'

With an exhibition in Narberth and another opening next Saturday in Cardigan, artist Elizabeth Haines is closing 2025 with a spirit of creativity and communication. She tells Jenny White about the navigation tools for making real art

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WHEN I hear music, I see shapes," says Elizabeth Haines. She is describing her experience of synaesthesia - the theme and title of her current exhibition at Oriel Q in Narberth.

Synaesthesia (“joined perception”) was famously experienced by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, helping him to become a pioneer of abstraction in Western art.

For Haines, as for Kandinsky, the ability to experience a stimulus with more than one of her senses is central to her art. And like Kandinsky, Haines is not interested in literal depiction. While the landscape that surrounds her west Wales home may be discernible in much of her work, she always tends towards abstraction, using the shapes and colours of landscape as a means of exploration rather than an end in themselves.

"If people say, 'What's that picture supposed to be?' it implies that it is supposed to be something, whereas I would say I don't always know what it's supposed to be," she says.

Instead of defining the goal, she takes intuitive steps, drawing on external stimuli including sights, sounds, and even world events, and internal tools, skills, techniques and languages honed during her lifetime.

"When you get to my age, you've got an awful lot in your head, and an awful lot of memories," she says. "I've been drawing since I was three; my first memory was drawing on my bedroom wall, so when you've been doing it since then, the act of drawing becomes like turning on a tap.

"What comes out is the accumulation, in no particular order, of things you've experienced, good and bad connections that you've made. I never quite know where a painting is going to go. Sometimes, yes, but not always. This is a cast of mind quite common to composers, and quite particularly, to writers."

Even for those who do not experience synaesthesia with the clarity of artists like Haines or Kandinsky, the interplay between the senses is still fundamental to the creation of real art.