About
âExplorations', Recent work by Colin Finn
Colin Finn's rich, varied and mobile life has always included painting - from being a student in Birmingham College of Art in 1953, soldiering through National Service and teaching as a lecturer in art schools in the UK thereafter.
His work has been exhibited - paintings, canvas sculptures, installations, etchings with the Birmingham Society of Artists, with Hull sail makers, Arts Council touring shows, the Barbican, the Mall and other London galleries, and for shows in Oslo and Japan. From Lecturer in Painting at Oxford he became Head of Painting in Liverpool, visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and later Head of Fine Art at Maidstone College of Art.
When retired he showed in the Singer/Friedlander watercolour exhibitions at the Royal Institute and at the Guardian âArt for Sale' show before moving, yet again, to Pembrokeshire. The move spurred his enthusiasm for photography and landscape painting.
Painting steadily, Colin continued gathering information and ephemera about his latest obsessions which have included Atlantis, islands, geological phenomena, particular mountains, the âlost' houses of Wales, airships and submarines, fossils, architectural oddities, incised chalk figures ... He came out of hibernation with a solo show, Mythscapes, in Tenby in 2009 which brought together some of these themes: his current exhibition, Explorations, reveals more both in terms of subjects and methods.
Hafod was an exquisite mansion house near Aberystwyth filled with artistic and literary treasures an academic salon. It was lost to fire and dereliction and survives only in the original plans and depictions of the C18th and now in a series of paintings by Colin Finn. Towers is another groups of paintings ghostly, intricate buildings stranded in woodland and in the Mountain paintings Colin uses both local topography as well as imagined remote, inaccessible heights. Caprices is a series of collages of ethereal faces and unusual nudes juxtaposed with other images, creating both fashion plates and enigmatic puzzles. The Prisoners group includes etchings, dark images of men in transit and some personal âmemorials' to young Finn family members lost in the First World War.
Skilful above all, the exhibition shows Colin Finn's huge range of interests and knowledge in an intriguing body of work in turns, beautiful, sinister, mystical or poignant.
Explorations will show at The White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby 2nd -28th October with Colin being in the gallery from 2-4 pm Saturday 4th to talk with any visitors who wish to meet him, and everyone is welcome. The gallery is open 10am- 5pm daily (closed Wednesdays). For further information phone 01834-843375 or see the website: www.artmatters.org.uk.
