Rob Finn in Conversation with Carl Little from The Maine Arts Journal, Summer 2024 edition: CL: You have focused on trees in recent years. Do you use sketches in developing these arboreal portraits? RF: Sketching is about describing what you see and its journey through your eye, processed by your brain, down your arm to your hand, and onto the paper. Painting the final tree in my large-scale studio work is like sketching, in that realism is not my goal. I’m looking for an experience that is very visceral and immediate. I want the viewer to see the motion of my hand and brush while also feeling the primacy of the tree. With this loose approach to the final piece, I’m developing a language of marks that describes the organic processes of growth, structure, and dynamics of motion in and around the tree. One of the broader goals of my tree portraits in the last seven years has been to investigate the correlation between the physiology of humans and trees. When we establish empathy with another being, we de-objectify them and learn more about ourselves in the process. We’re used to that experience when we see portraits of people. Not so much with a portrait of a tree.