Biography

At the heart of Finch’s practice is this romantic impulse to see what others have seen, and to share that impression— to accurately convey it—to a multitude. Often Finch is drawn to the idea of experiencing what certain historic figures have envisaged, and he imagines that the light of the sun is perhaps the singular phenomenon that may not have changed over the years.1 With that in mind, he has traveled to Troy to record the dawn that the Greek hero Achilles saw, ventured to Lascaux to document the sunset that the earliest artists would have witnessed outside the now-famous caves (fig. 2), and made numerous pilgrimages to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, to experience and transcribe visually the light she so eloquently described in her poems. Light and its color are ultimately the subjects that fascinate Finch and those that he returns to again and again—along with the perceptual, physiological, psychological, and linguistic workings that influence how we experience them. Like many artists and thinkers who have inspired him and who turn up in his work—scientists, artists, poets, and philosophers, including Monet, Turner, Newton, Dickinson, Goethe, and Wittgenstein—Finch is continuously celebrating, and grappling with, the beauty and enigmas of light and color. His mix of science and poetry is fitting for a subject that is equally tied to science and art.”