The Finch Project was founded in 2022 by Nikki Finch, who has 15 years’ experience of the visual arts working in Melbourne, Singapore and London. This new contemporary Art Gallery on Dundas Street aims to bring a fresh perspective to Edinburgh through a carefully curated programme, supporting a dynamic roster of early and mid-career international artists.
Its inaugural solo exhibition, A Tale Worth Telling, is by the Canadian artist Anne Griffiths, from Victoria, British Columbia. After a successful career as an art director, designer and illustrator, she now focuses on painting, interpreting the landscape through abstracted form and expressive colour. The collection comprises ten paintings whose titles reflect the writing of literature such as prose, synopsis, tropes, fiction and verisimilitude.
‘They are a way of admitting that what I bring home from the woods or the ocean is not a record of the place but a version of it; the places I paint are the forests and shorelines of British Columbia where I have lived my whole life.’ – Anne Griffiths
A dynamic diptych entitled Far Fetched Trope subtly captures this essential blend of observation and imagination. Griffiths transforms trees, foliage, sky and sea into symbolic shapes and sinuous lines, while the linen surface gives a tactile, embroidered quality. Muted ochres, rust reds, teal blues and tobacco browns form a complex, earthy palette with pale patches expressing a glimmer of light. The two panels are interlinked but also appear to interrupt one another through leafy imagery that is neither wholly recognisable nor entirely abstract. Ideas of a woodland seem to emerge and dissolve within the intricate patterning, as if reconstructing the reality of place with a dream-like quality.
The piece’s title adds a playful intellectual dimension: a trope is a recurring motif, while far-fetched suggests something stretched beyond the literal or believable – an apt description of Griffiths’ process: familiar botanical motifs are pushed into the realm of reminiscence and creative association.
Free Verse again transforms the natural world into a dense whirl of gesture, shape and space. This is like painterly choreography, allowing forms to gather and overlap rather than delineating a particular place realistically. Soft shades of sage, mint, powder blue, dusty pink and cream are punctuated by burgundy and brown with energetic mark-making. Rather than a pure abstract vision, such as geometric colour fields devoid of literal reference, this verges on the Impressionistic: vibrant, perpetually in motion, focusing on light and atmosphere.
Amorphous shapes give the composition a fluid structure of curving contours and sculptured shoreline, giving the suggestion of green trees, layered rocks and lush foliage. Beneath its calm surface, patches of darker colour introduce tonal contrast and depth while the linen background evokes a rich texture. Like literary ‘free verse’ which follows natural speech, the painting follows its own visual flow, moving through a fragmented forest to capture the joyful feeling of being there – the seclusion and sound of silence.
‘Amid this wild, free scene, how joyous, how healthy and vigorous and sweet,
For the soul prefers freedom in the prairie or the untrodden woods.’
– from The Poet in Nature, Walt Whitman
The title painting, A Tale Worth Telling, explodes in a multi-coloured myriad of fantastical imagery, akin to viewing the environment as a world map. Crafted like a tapestry, intense blues weave through russet, plum, olive and cream while disjointed tree trunks appear to rise vertically among scattered leaves and pools of water. The repeated criss-crossing, striated segments seem to spread and shimmer as though wind and shadowy light are constantly rearranging the scene. Bold brushstrokes and oil-stick outlines create a meandering connective tissue across the composition, giving balance and cohesion despite the vivacious, visual complexity.
There’s something almost mysterious here in its dark, moody tone which references the theme of a ‘fairytale’ narrative: a haunting concept of place through a distant haze of memory which Griffiths recalls with quiet contemplation like a half-forgotten story waiting to be told.
The title Prose is intriguing: the equivalent to an extract from a novel or memoir, the artist replaces language with a page without words. With spontaneous expression, the ad-hoc forms seem to float and interlock in an interplay of hues, depth and luminosity, etched like a geographical aerial view. This echoes the pioneering palette and pattern of Paul Sérusier’s Le Talisman (1888), which he described as a ‘synthetic’ colour-equivalent landscape, based on Gauguin’s advice, ‘Don’t copy nature too closely. Art is abstract.’
The fluid dance of organic shapes, devoid of rigid lines, features scumbled surfaces of rugged earth or reflective water – a river of blue snakes across, providing a pathway through the asymmetrical composition. Through the cadence of colour and texture, it seems to reflect a frozen moment within the seasonal transformation of the environment. A precisely crafted, personal narrative which speaks eloquently in its own painterly ‘prose’ of the canvas.
‘Nature in all forms is the subject that speaks loudest to me – pattern, the language of line, contrast, colour – and from that I paint from memory. I let myself work very intuitively, the process of discovery and exploration.‘ – Anne Griffiths
Collaborative Fiction is a journey of discovery into the liminal space between the reality of a landscape and a re-imagined view. Glimmering colour, light and shadow, chestnut brown. icy blues and moss green distil the natural environment to its elements, allowing for ambiguity and interpretation. This ambiguity is where the ‘fiction’ blossoms as our logical mind tries to assign meaning – perhaps a lakeside line of trees with golden autumnal leaves reflected on the water. It feels like peering into a fantasy world – shapes morph and shift defying strict definition, as if Griffiths is sketching out ideas in a Woolf-ian stream of consciousness.
With a professional background in commercial design, she layers compositions through a chromatic balance of colour and spatial dimension to illustrate a sensory experience. In musical terms, this is like a tranquil Nocturne, oozing meditative calm tinged with nostalgia for a distant, lost horizon of Shangri-La.
Mesmerising in its depth of saturated colour and fluid motion, Synopsis is reminiscent of a swirling mass of ocean with a flourish of spiky grasses and flashes of coral or rock. The blues range from placid teal to luminous cerulean and frothy aqua tones, creating the feeling of being submerged underwater. Brushstrokes are visible and deliberate, from smooth transitions to agitated impasto passages that catch the light with a phosphorescent glow. Colour theory is expertly handled, the cool blues complemented by warm burgundy and crimson to create tonal tension and harmony.
The word Synopsis suggests a condensed overview, summarising the essence of a larger narrative. Rather than a specific place, this is about introspection, tracing the map of memory and metaphor to find a seascape of the mind.
This series of lush, lyrical landscapes illustrates how Anne Griffiths has mastered her own expressive, visual vocabulary of rhythmic colour, contour, light and space to capture the ‘good for the soul’, fresh-air experience of nature in the wild.
Anne Griffiths has recently published Mapping Nature, a limited-edition, 138-page book presenting works from 2022 to 2025, each evoking a quiet conversation between memory and abstraction.
With thanks to Vivien Devlin for contributing this review.
