Finley Yates

Finley Yates is an Artist from South Ayrshire, living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland.

His current body of work, A Picture of Wholeness, uses painting as a time-capsule. Within the series, Finley’s painting becomes a tool for collation and illumination, dredging a deep trench of interests spanning Contemporary Literature and Music, Science-Fiction, and Marine life.

The Title of this series comes from William Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934). In this collection of short stories, Saroyan expounds a theory about the nature of ‘true impressions.’ His theory argues that honest depictions require a repeated circling of the subject, translating it from all angles, perspectives, and moods.

A Picture of Wholeness favours communication and experience above all, rejecting linearity, narrative and logic, hoping to form—as a wholly composed series –an honest visual language reflective of Finley’s perspective on the world.

Ambiguity, and a sense of ‘Mood’ as described by writer and theorist Simon Vistrup Madsen, are integral to this series. In line with Madsen’s thinking, Finley asks of the viewer multiple modes of interaction with his paintings; they may be experienced instantaneously or mulled over like a poem half-remembered in the beginning haze of sleep.

Finley hopes his paintings to be like Music.

Works from this series were previously exhibited in Iggy Pop isn’t Dead, Cameo Picturehouse (May 2025), Winter Orb, Whitespace (December 2025), and Band Members Wanted, Whitespace (February 2026).

Finley will present an extended viewing of this series in the Edinburgh College of Art Degree show in May 2026.