Michael Finn: the artist and his faith

As a practising Roman Catholic, Finn’s Christian faith was an important part of his life. Throughout his teaching career, staff and pupils commented upon his deep reserves of grace and goodness. The last twenty years of his life after leaving teaching were spent in spiritual exploration – fusing prayer, experience, landscape and iconography into his work. The canvasses with their influences from the Americans Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, were counter-pointed by the semi-figurative crucifixes; these were constructed from simple wooden off-cuts painted in the muted subtle browns, ochres, blacks, blues and reds of his two dimensional works. Hung together in a major exhibition at Newlyn Art Gallery in 1989 the effect was stunning.

It was the next major exhibition in the year 2000, jointly at Newlyn and Falmouth Art Galleries, which showed recent works of great spiritual maturity, and here the influence of Mark Rothko in particular would be acknowledged. Finn’s paintings became soaked in rich and sonorous hues: blues, purples, deep reds, russet browns worked up on subtle ground were interspersed with white or cream canvasses or seeming simplicity. It doesn’t take the viewer long to be drawn into a number of questions – spiritual or theological; questions beyond the aesthetic pleasure derived from engagement with colour. The works are not descriptive in the sense of depiction or narrative; they seem to speak a different language about mystery, about things which are perhaps un-sayable. They may invoke a personal spiritual response like being in a place which invokes a sense of the holy or numinous; they may indeed provoke religious questions about the haunting of infinite space. Finn’s paintings are good enough to be timeless – but nonetheless it may be helpful to know of his own contemplative prayerful approach to painting. Not to be confused with conventional piety but more aligned with the thoughts and writings of the French philosopher, theologian and social activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) whose ‘Waiting on God’ influenced the religious outlook of the generations of the post war period as did the poetry of TS Eliiot. Finn’s search is perhaps is summed up in a passage from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets (1944) which spoke to the imagination of those who had survived a period of total war. Only poetry and art could provide an adequate language in which to engage the deeper questions of God and life.

I said to my soul be still and wait without hope.
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought for you are not yet ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

So the paintings of Michael Finn might be approached as waiting upon God. The crucifixes were worked upon between paintings. Again the same hues prevailed but these works seem to be more about dialogue than waiting – though the last crucifixes transfigured into empty simple painted wooden crosses of enigmatic simplicity – ‘more in less’. Finn firmly believed that in the Christian faith, God could not be possessed. Along with the early prophets and disciples, he was content to wait for Him.

John Halkes for Truro Cathedral, 2009.