From today (Friday) Tenby's newest art space, Art Matters at the White Lion Street Gallery, will be filled with the colour and light emanating from the latest paintings of Elizabeth Haines.

Elizabeth trained as an illustrator before moving to Pembrokeshire 40 years ago where she has worked as a painter, illustrator, teacher and writer.

Earlier illustrative and topographical work has shifted now towards expressionism, and although now more reliant on her memory and imagination, her current painting is always reinforced by her years of rigorous drawing from life. A temporary hand injury and enforced use of her left hand marks the shift.

Influenced by painters such as Klee and Kandinsky, the British school including Palmer, Hitchens, the St. Ives painters and the Scottish colourists, Elizabeth has also engaged with the other arts throughout her life and in 2001 completed her Ph.D in philosophy at the University of Wales, Lampeter, formally tracing connections between art and music and poetry.

Elizabeth paints prolifically, drawing every day, experimenting with different media and their application, engaging with other artists in collaboration, contributing not only physically, to exhibitions and artistic ventures, but also intellectually to the continuing debate about art.

To date, Elizabeth's work has featured in exhibitions in most of the major galleries in Wales. She has undertaken commercial illustrations, worked with art societies and schoolchildren, won art competitions, been artist-in-residence in a variety of settings, and taught at Carmarthen College of Art.

Her critical studies and discussion papers have been published, she has contributed to community projects and art fairs and travelled and shown work in France.

Her work has been purchased for public collections by the Arts Council of Wales, the Contemporary Arts Society for Wales, the University of Wales, Haverfordwest Museum and the National Library of Wales.

The exhibition, prepared over the last year, has sometimes been inspired by poetry, not as a direct illustration of the poet's words, but creating a link between the verbal and the visual patterning.

"Her response to a particular Welsh poem illustrates her sensitivity to poetry combined with her experience of Welsh landscape - the cultural landscape of Pembrokeshire, not wildness alone - to affect her mature imaginative development," writes Jeremy Hooker in 'Planet', in his review of her exhibition in the spring edition of the magazine.

Images of small hamlets of close dwellings, sometimes with roaming cattle or sheep, emerge from shapes in paint, half defined. The changing weather, the unpredictable sky and the landscapes of Wales, the Marches and France, are presented in rich colours, strong swathes of paint, revealing one story and concealing another.

Mysterious, multi-layered in paint and thought, the viewer cannot simply look at the paintings, but is inevitably drawn into a communication with the considerable mind and imagination of the artist, Elizabeth Haines.

The exhibition, 'Flooded with light' opens on today (Friday) and continues until May 28. There is an opportunity to meet Elizabeth Haines tomorrow (Saturday) from 2 to 4 pm and everyone is invited. White Lion Street Gallery is open every day except Wednesday from 10 am to 5 pm.

For further information, telephone 843375, email [email protected]">[email protected] or view the exhibition on the gallery website http://www.artmatters.org.uk">www.artmatters.org.uk