THE PAINTINGS OF ANN FAWSSETT ATKIN. In his famous book, On Modern Art, Paul Klee, discussing his creative intentions states Our pounding heart drives us down, deep down to the source of all and chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. Such might have been written about or by Ann, a painter, like Klee, of the laws underlying natures forms. Few artists have entered this vegetable world. In his marvellous drawings of plantsthe Star of Bethlehem and flowering rushes - and especially, too, in his drawings of swirling water, Leonardo da Vinci, obsessed by a vital force, with his genius fathomed the sustaining spirit at the heart of creation. Everything he discovered was in a state of flux. With Ann the same delight in vegetable creation finds expression in a less fluid approach There are leaves or petals or sepals. There is persistent greenness. There is succulence and juice. There is a feeling of entry - and ubiquitous ness. Grass said Walt Whitman, is the handkerchief of the Lord. And Anns all-over paintings might be described in much the same spirit. But her paintings have some of the dynamic stiffness of a fleshy, opening bloom. There is about them, mysteriously, a sense of vital organic growth, stilled by wonder and a feeling, such as a spring meadow suggests, of sacred time. The pictures parallel not the products of nature but their development. We enter each picture in all directions - from left to right and from top to bottom and inwards: we are immersed in the space stretching in all directions, with no beginning or end. No I in opposition to out there. No now as opposed to then. Perhaps then these paintings are a metaphor for the whole of creation? Perhaps they are images of Genesis itself - icons of the cosmos on the Third Day? Perhaps they are the contemporary equivalent of that other and perennial symbol of our unity with the natural world: the Green Man. Either way Anns paintings return us to nature and our own. John Lane.