Colin Lawrence Finn (1933-2020) was an artist whose work spanned 70 years from his days at art college in Birmingham in the 1950s. He worked in art colleges across the country; Oxford, Hull, Liverpool and Maidstone (where he was Head of Fine Art). He continued to produce his own work during this time. His early work in the 1960s and 1970s was abstract and he exhibited large-scale works at The Serpentine Gallery in London and The Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. He returned to painting landscape in the early 1980s and began a series of paintings based on views of the Kent coast and landscape. He moved to Pembrokeshire with his wife Yvonne in 1999 and worked full time as a painter and art photographer, exhibiting at the White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby and The Carningli Gallery in Newport. He was inspired by the Pembrokeshire landscape and produced a great variety of paintings. One series ‘The White Mountain Series’ was based on views of Carningli. He had more recently begun a series of marine paintings which set old sailing ships against coastal landscapes.

His son, Benjamin Finn is a well-known stained-glass artist and he and his sisters are beginning the work of creating an online archive of Colin Finn’s work. It will be possible to see more examples of his work in due course,