My Interest in art began very early in life, compulsively drawing and sketching every day , fascinated by the visual imagery surrounding me and the way popular culture presented itself.

Despite this I remember feeling I wanted more.

As a teenager I acquired a small set of oil paints and began to experiment with no instruction or guidance.

I had also become interested in art movements such as Surrealism and DaDa and then later Futurism and Vorticism. Photography had also become a factor in my work, I was experimenting with monochrome film, which I developed and printed at home.

The photographers of Magnum, others such as Moriyama, then Eggleston, Parr and much later the photographers associated with the movement 'The New Topographics' such as Stephen Shore and Bernd and Hilla Becher, gave me an insight into a new way I could look at the world.

I studied painting to Degree level at Falmouth School of Art between 1985 and 1988.

Fuelled by these myriad of ongoing influences, my painting slowly moved to a version of Photorealism.

I tried to achieve a neutrality, devoid of style (not easy), but conveying the required levels of objective detail. I did not want the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion to 'drive' the work.
More wanting to use this visual aesthetic as a ‘jumping off’ point in my painting. The resulting, seemingly ‘photorealistic’ works, with their inherent sense of painterliness, bridge a gap, which I hope defines something new.

David Finnigan