Pink Floyd Backs
Eight hand-signed prints, made in honour of Storm Thorgerson for the thirtieth anniversary of an image Finlay first created for Pink Floyd in 1995.
In 1995, working beside the legendary sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson, Finlay Cowan created Backs, the world-famous image for Pink Floyd. Over twenty years together they made hundreds of concept drawings and artworks, for Pink Floyd, Muse, The Cranberries and many others.
In 2014 the two of them talked about Backs one last time. Storm urged Finlay to keep reinventing it, as he himself had done with his own images over the years. A few weeks later Storm was gone.
“It turned out to be the last time I saw him. This series is in honour of his memory, and of the work we did together.”
Finlay Cowan
Thirty years on, each of the eight figures carries a different album across her back. Every print is made to order and signed by Finlay himself.
All 8 prints, each laid between sheets of black glassine and housed in an archival box, together with an original A5 sketch drawn by Finlay for that folio alone. Every folio is numbered one of ten. Only ten will ever be made in each size.
Erothanatos
A journey into the self, drawn in the language of sacred geometry.
Eros and Thanatos: the drive towards life and the pull towards death, which the old myths treated as one force seen from two sides. Erothanatos follows the soul through both. It begins bound to the earth by memory and attachment, then descends, climbs the ladder of the spine until the ego falls away, meets its shadow, is reborn into nature, and returns carrying the power to create.
Drawn by Finlay Cowan between 2017 and 2023, each image is a single stage of that passage, worked in fine line through lattices of hexagons and crystal, roots and bone, architecture and flesh. Each takes as its sitter a real person, an artist, a healer or a teacher, who lent their likeness to a stage of the journey.
Nature, technology, flesh, bone, crystal. All as one.
The journey closes with an epilogue: the Buddha and Guan Yin, stillness and compassion. Every print is made to order and signed by Finlay, and each is available as a duotint on request.
All 12 prints, each laid between sheets of black glassine and housed in an archival box, together with an original A5 sketch drawn by Finlay for that folio alone. Every folio is numbered one of ten. Only ten will ever be made in each size.
Childhood’s End
A curated collection of unpublished artworks from the archive.
Much of what an artist draws never leaves the studio, or leaves it so changed that its first form is forgotten. Across two decades with Storm Thorgerson, for every image the world saw, dozens more would go into the plan chest: paintings, studies and sketches made for Pink Floyd, put away and, as far as anyone knew, forgotten.
Then, occasionally, one finds its way back. A sketch Finlay made in 2005 for a David Gilmour album sat in the archive for twenty years, until it was brought to life for the fiftieth-anniversary reissue of Wish You Were Here, and one of his concepts took its place in the canon.
Childhood’s End opens the plan chest a little further. Echoes is where one such journey began: the original concept, in pencil and pastels and in its first pencil draft, for what became, much evolved, an album sleeve. Beside it are two works that have never left the studio: The Last Days of Summer, the albums flown as kites over the hills, and a portrait of Syd Barrett. Whether they will one day find their own way into the world, nobody can say. Until then, all four are printed here for the first time, made to order and signed by Finlay.
Seasons in China
Brush and ink portraits from the road east.
Drawn alongside the writing of Seasons in China, these are the faces of the book: women met in the glass towers and back streets of Shanghai and Hangzhou, set down in the quick, certain line of the ink brush and sealed with Finlay’s Chinese name chop.
Two of them became the covers of the two volumes, A Halo of Strangeness and A Tender Storm. The third, The Kindness of Strangers, takes its name from the chapter in which a stranger’s gentleness undoes the narrator. Each is made to order and signed by Finlay.
