✱ Finlay Gašpar is an Artist, Illustrator, and Designer based in Manchester, UK.
✱ Alongside his personal art practice, Finlay works commercially across illustration, design, and visual direction. He collaborates with fashion brands, musicians, and independent platforms, creating artwork for editorial, campaigns, and applied visual projects. His background in luxury fashion retail and e-commerce marketing brings a strong understanding of brand, audience, and context, allowing him to translate expressive, instinct-led work into considered and effective visual outcomes without compromising its character.
For work enquiries please contact → finlaygaspar.studio@gmail.com
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STYLE
My work is created through an ongoing exploration of the space between reality and imagination. I'm drawn to how these two states separately inform the liveliness of my practice, aiming to create worlds with their own inner life while still feeling familiar and emotionally grounded.
My way of working began at 17, spending long periods drawing in isolation and building a personal visual language. By 19, this developed into an interest in capturing the expressions of sound - exploring lyrical abstraction and cartoonism - which led to a four-year investigation into automatism and biomorphic forms. Today, my work depicts people, animals, objects, and environments with that same energy, focusing on rhythm, motion, and the imperfect play that connects us all.
Culture & Influence
My creative outlook has always been shaped by curiosity and discovery. Growing up, summers were spent between San Martino di Castrozza in the Italian Dolomites, and Rosnov in the Czech countryside. Both these places sparked a lifelong fascination with nature, animals, adventure and atmosphere.
Back home in England, I spent lots of time as a child at my grandparents recreating newspaper comic strips. My grandad was an incredibly talented painter, writer and craftsperson. He was offered to be an apprentice comic artist for the Sheffield Star after finishing school, but chose to be a trader as his friends were and he needed quick money. He encouraged me to be creative from an early age.
During my college years studying Art & Design, I was drawn to urban exploration and graffiti, where I learnt the blend of rhythm and expression. Painting walls early in my career led me to discover lots about my practice - a fascination with the textures of urban walls, and the value of owning imperfections.
That same sense of searching runs through other parts of my life now - where I go vinyl digging, chasing rare records and unexpected sounds, and attending fashion shows across Europe. Music, fashion, art, and the streets constantly intersect in my practice. They all speak to finding beauty in what’s real, personal, and in motion.
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BA(Hons) Illustration with Animation @ Manchester School of Art 2021
