Walking into a white, light studio filled with paintings that layer real landscape with imagined places, or remembered places is quite an experience. Maggie's studio is part of the Bay Art complex in what was Cardiff's old docklands. The building is a warren of studios, reached by original staircases with worn stone steps and decorative railings. I rented its studio flat for a month to complete my novel The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum. Now, I'm seeing it from the artist's point of view.Outside, thunder, lightening and heavy rain; inside, a rich palette of colour, some of it worked on canvas, or on small squares of thick cardboard. Maggie has created variations on a theme, exploring two particular landscapes but she's not worked them up in a figurative fashion, but something more complex: layers on layers. I like the first painting I see, strong pinks breaking out from a sweep of green brushstrokes. These are claustrophobic spaces, which she says are influenced by old houses she's lived in and their overgrown gardens. Later pictures are linked through a series of motifs, a bird of prey, Scottish pines, bent tree branches and wayward grasses. The most recent pictures are painted in a much freer style and reflect an interest in breaking out of those enclosed spaces. Maggie's stuck; she has a large number of paintings and doesn't know whether to go back and re-work early pictures, or look to the future. I suggest she selects six key works and then creates short narratives around each, using drawings and works-in-progress as satellite pictures to accompany those. It's a bit like reaching the end of one novel, or short story and already having the seeds for the next idea pulling at your imagination. You can't be fully committed to fnishing the older piece, but it's too soon to start the new. She's excited by that idea and it's a move forwards.Back to the office, hopping through puddles. One shoe gets soaked, the other stays dry. Dropping into rehearsals for The Queen of Spades (www.wno.org.uk) where the puppeteers have started work with the singers. The bunraku puppets are extraordinary, the male puppet reflects the feature of its designer John MacFarlane; the female puppet is a dead ringer for Kate Moss. It takes at least 2 puppeteers to work them, each disguised by a black head wrap that makes them look like funereal beekeepers. They wear long black gloves, like old fashioned opera gloves, to minimise distraction as they fold and arrange the puppets' limbs. The Count smokes a cheroot - thanks to a clever device sewn into his torso. The puppeteers' have to have brilliant co-ordination as they must share tasks like shuffling cards, or counting out bank notes in the gambling house where the Countess meets her fate.Bay Art Gallery has a new exhibition, which I plan to visit when I can tear myself away from puppets and Tchaikovsky's wonderful music! (www.bayart.org.uk)