About
Petria Lenehan is an Irish contemporary artist living and working in County Wicklow. A colourist and painter, she works in fluid acrylics and oils - moving between intimate canvases, mixed-media works on paper, and expansive large-scale paintings. Her practice centres on connection, emotion, and the quiet intricacies of being alive within the natural world.
With a background in both English literature and fashion design, and following a move to New York with her family in 2014, she began to delve deeply into painting. After several years developing and selling her work in the U.S., she returned to rural Ireland to focus on her art practice full-time.
From her studio in County Wicklow, Petria paints atmospheric abstract landscapes that express her deep connection to place and nature. The paintings are interpretations of landscapes both internal and external, exploring overlapping themes of sensory perception, memory, and the elemental forces of the natural world.
Her process is one of intuitive unfolding - a continuous cycle of layering, revealing, and what she calls “unpainting” - where removal and reduction are as vital as the act of painting itself. Each work becomes a quiet exploration of being: to feel, to notice, to belong - and to live within the complex weave of tenderness and tension, clarity and doubt, fragility and resilience. There is a gentle, healing energy to be found within the work - an invitation to pause, to breathe, and to reconnect with the deeper rhythms that bind us to the living world.
Petria distils this meeting of place and timelessness through her work, creating paintings that move between the seen and unseen, between the physical and the felt. Her collectors include private individuals, galleries, commercial spaces, architects and interior designers, all drawn by a shared recognition of the contemplative and expansive space her paintings inhabit.
