Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Printmaking
Website: paintedmary.squarespace.com
Mary Finlayson (b. 1982) is a Canadian-born painter and printmaker based in San Francisco. She grew up in British Columbia and went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, 2004), a Graduate Diploma in Art Therapy from the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute (2007), and a Bachelor of Art Education from the University of British Columbia (2010). She spent roughly a decade working as an art teacher and art therapist before relocating to the Bay Area, where she has lived and worked on Potrero Hill.
Finlayson transitioned to full-time painting in 2017, attending residencies at Vermont Studio Center and OTIS College (Los Angeles) before committing entirely to her studio practice. She has since shown work across San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and internationally, and has been represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. Her commissions include large-scale murals for Google, Facebook, Asana, and Anthropologie.
Finlayson works primarily in acrylic gouache and flashe paint on canvas, building up velvety matte surfaces through a process that begins with photography, collage, and colored-pencil sketching before she arrives at a final composition. Her paintings flatten and reimagine domestic interiors and still lifes—rooms crowded with books, plants, patterned textiles, ceramics, and art objects—distorting perspective to emphasize emotional resonance over strict representation. “I am more interested in capturing the feeling of a space than depicting it strictly as it appears,” she has said. Color is her declared primary medium; her palette shifted toward pinks and yellows after moving to California, and her decisions about hue remain largely intuitive even when compositions are rigorously planned. Rooted in the tradition of the still life but filtered through the flattening strategies of Matisse, Hockney, and Stuart Davis, her work carries an additional charge from her background in silkscreen and lithography. Beginning around 2023, she expanded into mosaic, embedding complex tonal gradations into what appear, at first glance, to be single-color grounds.
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