Finn Robinson

I make paintings from images I feel drawn towards, usually without fully knowing why. I start with something I’ve seen, often from European art history, that feels emotionally familiar or has a recognisable charge. Painting becomes a way for me to work through these encounters, dwell on what I’m responding to, and stage alternative readings.

My work usually starts honestly from my subject, but the truth shifts as I paint. Things change through colour, gesture, clothing, and atmosphere, and the image slips away from its source as it drifts towards my desires. I treat art history as a living source and return to the past to understand what might continue to resonate, without trying to resolve its complexities. Feelings like awkwardness, shame, desire, and excess can shift in meaning through painting, and I want to stay with the instability that comes from my contemporary gaze, not soothe it.

The figures in my work aren’t direct self-portraits, but they often sit on the fringes between observation and projection. They can be read as a reflection of shifting states of identity, where different versions of self are performed rather than fixed. The paintings operate like a theatre, and my characters pause mid-performance as they prepare for something unknown.

At its core, my paintings are about working with existing images rather than against them; letting them develop unstable selves that can be misread, repeated, and reformed through painting, enduring the traces of their histories and inhabiting a sense of self.

(b.2000, Inverness, Scotland).