Oct 10

Sarah Finucane

Sarah Finucane is a contemporary abstract painter who has exhibited in Connecticut with Jill Rae Designs and Ridgefield Guild. Her work has been triple featured in British Vogue magazine as well as in Suboart magazine, Wescover Editorial, and a catalogue with the Savannah College of Art & Design. Sarah has been featured multiple times in collections on Saatchi Art.

The paintings typically combine a contemporary pop art palette of neon colors such as hot pinks with neutral tones such as grays, blacks, whites, and yellow ochre. Sarah executes her paintings into asymmetrical grids, in other words, each painting actually becomes several paintings combined into one composition. Such a process invokes a heightened sense of visual stimulation in the sheer busyness of the painted forms.

Containing various invocations of linearity, scribbles, organic shapes, and patterns, these large-scale paintings cleverly fill up the space with a sense of contemporary urban design. Much like jazz music or the busy life of a city downtown, Sarah’s compositions appear highly improvised, and although appearing nonobjective, are actually emotionally based on specific concepts as indicated by the titles. On occasion, Sarah includes abstract imagery of various subject matter incorporated into her designs such as text, berries, and florals. The subjects appear to be chosen to add to the overall design element rather than as a literal statement by themselves. As a conceptual abstract painter, Sarah explores the complexities of surface through variation in application but grounded in stability with the use of patterns and grids.

Undertow (pictured above) depicts what was intended as floral shapes but comes off more like mechanical fans in patterns streaking across the surface. The dark ‘fan blades’ twist and turn across the surface in patterns followed by minimal linear streaks of hot pink and diamond shapes on the top of the painting. Undertow invokes a great sense of motion and stimulation and can be described as a basis for Sarah’s objective in her work, which remains to excite and entice the viewers towards her unusual compositions.

Sarah Finucane explores surface, flatness, and motion through a heightened state of awareness through her visually striking paintings. These compositions bloom (or blast) towards the viewer’s imagination and eye, invoking a sense of urban grit and aesthetic through patterns complimented with random forms of linearity and scribbles of paint. The audience will travel through Sarah’s body of large paintings to discover a realm of appreciation for the flow of the paint. Her clever color combinations and unpredictable forms reveal compositions which create a great sense of excitement and adventurous thrill contained within the space.