Page 7 - Art First: Alexandra Haynes: The Shapes of Nature

shows continued for a further decade. Even after this, when her name disappeared from
the gallery listings, her practice never ceased. Haynes paints on a daily basis–and has done
continuously–going through hundreds of canvases, removing those that don’t quite
work from their stretchers and storing them in her barn. Even her studio is f lled with rolls
of discarded paintings, written of , but not quite ready for the scrap heap, as she regularly
returns to an idea or composition, zooming in to focus on a smaller section or to extract
an element she likes and thinks might work elsewhere. These canvases, alongside her
myriad sketchbooks, become her lexica in which the building blocks of her language,
the morphemes and graphemes, are f led.

Haynes’ career comprises a sustained argument with oil on canvas, ultimately trying to make
the material behave more like paper. Her landscape sketches–done in situ–are always water -
colour on paper, and there is something about this spontaneity, this immediacy, that Haynes
seeks to retain in her larger pieces. ‘I like paintings that you go into or through’, she explains,
‘I don’t want to be left on the surface.’ Her view of impasto is not positive (despite having
spent a long period working in this way) and she paints now on to a bare, sized canvas, using
watered down acrylics, relishing the f uidity and the way the edges bleed, taking on a life
of their own. Her compositions are semi-abstracted, taking organic shapes and placing them,
playfully, in various constellations–‘shapes in space’, she says. Inspirations abound, including
Barbara Hepworth, with her connecting strings. Living in the deep countryside of Somerset,
Haynes often visits Cornwall, where she is not only enchanted by the rock pools, which she
describes lyrically as ‘like looking into a jewellery box’, but where Hepworth’s studio and
garden of er a mecca, an ‘if-I-could-have-my-ideal-space-to-work-in’ dream.

The shapes in Haynes’ compositions are held together by a background of abstract geo -
metric planes in vivid pinks, yellows, greens and oranges. A sensuous palette, reverber ating
with the heat of the desert or the gently refracted sunrays through the water. Some times,
in more recent works, they are ‘strung’ together or pierced by lines–an uncon scious homage
to Hepworth. Haynes works intuitively and cannot tell you what she is going to do before
it is done. ‘Everything happens on the canvas. The ideas come afterwards’, she explains.