Luke Finn
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Luke Finn Manchester born and bred Luke Finn has always been interested in art. This first became apparent when I received a prize in primary school for painstakingly drawing and shading the inside of a pomegranate. This love of accumulative effort building up a finished piece has followed him through to his work today, where he is painting his silhouettes of people with a tiny brush. Luke Graduated with a BA in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art. Whilst he studied there he was given a glimpse of the the joy artists get from having their work exhibited. At university his work was hung in the Royal Scottish Academy and Chessel Gallery. In 2008 Luke returned to Manchester and have had work on display at Pirus Gallery in Didsbury Village, The Edge Gallery in Lancaster, as well as taking part in the craft fair at The Whitworth Art Gallery. Inspiration “At the heart of my work is a love of colour, drawing inspiration from the artists I most admire; Kandinsky, Rothko and Matisse. More recently I have begun to marry my abstracted, colourful drawings with the bold, graphic elements of my secondary inspiration; Cd covers, posters, wallpaper, and just about anything in the visual world with a clean, crisp finish. This recent work has utilised lino and wood cuts, merging defined, regimented shapes with a colourful, dreamlike background, often with a figurative element. I am a neat and patient person by nature which is reflected in my work. Even my abstract pieces have to have some balanced regimented shapes. I find inspired by the work of the impressionists. I create impressionistic portraits with hazy backgrounds, then I start to reduce the figures to just certain shapes and limbs.” To paper “I work predominantly in acrylics for their immediacy and bold colours, using palette knives, scraping tools and rags to build up backgrounds, only using brushes for finishing touches or intricate areas. I aim for my work to be visually arresting, often, building up layers of colour and texture, interspersed with smaller, more defined marks, always retaining an abstract impressionist quality. I work from photographs of the figure in motion; friends, family, famous people, fantasy figures, characters from books, or just people I have photographed in the street.” |