Jeanette Finn is a compulsive artist.   Any plain surface acts merely as an invitation to her to fill it with her striking, vibrant images.   With her large abstract oil paintings, she seeks to make  an immediate and powerful impact on the observer, while her fun watercolour animal pictures appeal to the child in everyone.     Her imagination is rife and her work vibrates with life, sunshine colours and strange imagery.   Her paintings have been described as fey, whimsical and dreamlike.   That she was born and grew up in South Africa is self-evident in the boldness and content of her work.

After a university education, majoring in English and Art History, the artist traveled for nine years contributing her very individual style to the advertising industry in the USA, Australia and Canada.     Soon after her return to South Africa, she began to paint full time and non-stop.   For the past 25 years she has been obsessed with painting, ceramics, sculptures and fabric design.   Whilst in South Africa, her work gained great popularity and she was selected to exhibit at the monthly open air "Artists under the Sun".   Her work was also exhibited in the Bijou Gallery, Gallery 21, the Sara Hassall Gallery and the Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg.   Before she left South Africa, she staged one last exhibition.   It was a sell-out.   Since then she has held successful exhibitions in all parts of the globe including the UK, Europe and the US.

Her work is amazingly varied.   Apart from oils and watercolours, Jeanette paints plates, including complete dinner services - adorable animal designs for children or unique and elegant abstracts for the adult dinner table.   Her talents also run to furniture (glass topped patio tables  and small occasional tables topped with brightly painted ceramic tiles);  wrought iron gates and steel sculptures;  T-shirt design and the creation of ornamental birds and snakes from absurdly shaped calabashes (gourds).   She also works with stained glass either as paintings in themselves or painting directly onto windows or large glass bottles.   What all these things have in common is the life that Jeanette Finn puts into them.

She has a very strong personal viewpoint on art in general and on painting in particular.    She believes that a painting should not become part of the furniture or lost in the décor.   "Each time one enters a room, one should see the painting anew", says Jeanette Finn.   If her paintings are  hung in the bathroom or kitchen, she is thrilled because people spend so much time there.   Her paintings now hang literally all over the world, from  Australia to Zimbabwe.   Jeanette Finn lives in London and Mallorca, but most of her paintings originate in Mallorca,  where Mediterranean light and colour enrich her style