Debbie Finn is a Canadian painter who works with both brush and palette knife, creating layered surfaces that emphasize colour and texture. From the industrial skyline of her hometown in Hamilton, Ontario, to the landscapes and traditions of her ancestors in the Bas-Saint-Laurent and Les Basques regions of Quebec, she draws her inspiration.
Her work has appeared in DVSA’s Annual Silent Auction, McMaster Innovation Park’s Art in the Workplace and Art at Seven, Waterloo’s Femme Folks’ Festival, Back Alley Studio and Gallery, and the AGO’s Portraits of Resilience (2021–2022), and was included in the Hamilton Arts Advisory Commission’s project Celebrating Resilience in the Arts. More recently, she has participated in The Way Within (Back Alley Studio and Gallery, 2025) and Hamilton’s Art Circuit (2025). One of her paintings is featured on the cover of Colleen O’Toole’s book Restoring Joy: 40 Days and 40 Nights on the Camino de Santiago.
Her paintings are held in private collections, a source of deep joy and gratitude for the artist. Her paintings seek to convey the warmth, colour, and quiet joy she finds in the world around her.
Artist Statement:
Held Together by Colour
This collection brings together work from different series that I’ve recently been exploring—abstract jesters, quiet towns, winter scenes, smokestacks, and a few that don’t quite fit a category.
My paintings sit somewhere between the real and the imagined. They draw on memory, mood, and the quiet influence of my French Canadian heritage—its places, stories, and landscapes that constantly shape how I see and paint the world.
It’s the colours that I keep returning to, the textures built up over time, and the space that painting gives me to let the work speak for itself. What brings me the most joy is hearing what stories the paintings tell other people.
