About — FINLAY TREVOR

ABOUT & EXHIBITIONS

Finlay Trevor is a Scottish based Painter whose work explores the relationship between rural communities, labour and landscape. A 2025 graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, his practice developed through sustained involvement with farming and fishing communities around Gairloch in the North West Highlands of Scotland. Working from direct observation, shared labour and relationships formed over time, Finlay creates portraits and landscapes concerned with inherited knowledge, changing rural industries and the physical realities of working with the land and sea.

His portrait Quest for the Mackintosh Man was selected for the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, London. He was also awarded the Visual Arts Scotland Graduate Showcase Award and shortlisted for the Mall Galleries Crinan Residency. His work has been exhibited with Open Eye Gallery and Morningside Gallery Graduate Show in Edinburgh, as well as in exhibitions including Visual Arts Scotland and the Royal Scottish Academy.

Whilst rooted in the North West Highlands, Finlay’s practice is developing into a broader investigation of rural communities and their relationship to place. In 2026, he spent over two months living and working within Natalei village in Fiji as part of a community-led building project. The experience is informing a new body of work examining collective effort, traditional knowledge, the natural world and the ways communities adapt to environmental and cultural change. Rather than moving away from his Scottish work, this developing strand extends the same central question: how are people shaped by the places they inhabit, and how do they in turn shape those places?

The Laing Art Gallery showed the National Portrait Gallery’s celebrated painting competition, the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025, now in its 43rd year. The exhibition was shown alongside Exploring Identity, a portraiture exhibition curated from North East Museums’ art collections that provides historical context to the Portrait Award.
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The Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award celebrates the very best in contemporary portraiture and is one of the most important platforms for portrait painters today. This year, 46 captivating portraits from around the world were selected for display in the exhibition.
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A recent body of work shown in the Open Eye gallery Edinburgh
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The gallery’s first graduate show brought together a standout group of emerging artists from the 2025 degree shows. Artists include Ella Williams, Tom Speedy, Anney White, and Harvey Stapleton, each of whom also received the RSA John Kinross Scholarship, along with VAS winner Mia Coutts and Finlay Trevor.
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Read The Scotsman review here
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Edinburgh College of Art Graduate Show 2025