'Field Work' – Yanny Petters

 I've just been to see Yanny Petters. She and her husband Tony live in a cosy, timber cottage that was once a cow house right beside the old stone farmhouse she grew up in near Enniskerry, Co Wicklow. I didn't notice it driving in, on another day of heavy rain, in what feels like an apocalyptic summer, but her house faces the Sugarloaf mountain. On my way out, the rain has cleared and I am startled by its bulk, looming behind a field of crinkle-fleeced sheep. 

And I am less dispirited, a little comforted. Yanny has been looking closely at nature for many years now. She sees whole worlds in a ditch or a meadow or a bog then gently taps us on the shoulder and shows them to us too. The depth of her attention to the natural world is amazing to us but not to her because she is amazed by what she sees. Endless diversity, one source. 

She shows us the beauty and strangeness of wild places, the miraculous systems and methods that underlie their apparent disorder. 

Her portraits reveal a tender, meticulous observation of her subjects - yellow irises, bulrushes on their ramrod stalks, dusky-pink reeds so real you can almost hear the dry whoosh they make when the wind blows. And they are portraits in the real sense - she is after their essence, just as a portraitist tries to capture the personality of their sitter. 

She told me that she begins at the roots and the painting grows from there. It is hardly surprising, given her empathy for plants that her method is also organic, a mirror of their growth process. 

There is a long tradition of botanic drawing and painting. The natural world has been fascinating and delighting people for aeons. Yanny is part of that tradition and yet her work is unique because she brings so much of her own spirit to it - her appreciation of the wonder of leaf and grass, flower and stem, leads to ours. 

Now more than ever we need this. We have destroyed so much, but there is still much to enjoy. At last, at long last, we are beginning to wake up, beginning to realise that we must pay attention. And Yanny's work helps us to do that. 

Cathy Dillon 
Arts journalist 
September 6th 2008