Awakening Landscapes

June 14 (Sat) – June 29 (Sun), 2025
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays
　
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MJK Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Japan by Finn Godwin.
　

“Art is not a reproduction of nature, but a re-creation of its essence.”
— Paul Cézanne
　
Before Amsterdam wakes, Finn Godwin steps quietly into the city’s edges. With sketchbook in hand, he walks alone—through forest paths, along still canals, beside the glint of lake water at dawn—seeking what the day is about to lose: a tree’s shadow catching first light, a dewdrop trembling on a wildflower, the hush just before the world begins.
　
For Finn, painting is solitude made visible. Though his work leans toward realism, it is not about accuracy—it is about attunement. He does not chase the sublime, but listens to the modest, the nearly missed: a private garden of early light and silence.
　
His sensibility echoes the quiet restraint of Japanese painter Katayama Bokuyō. In works like Field of Pampas Grass and Autumn in the Wilds, nature is pared down to its essentials—muted tones, empty space, time stilled. Finn, too, is drawn to this devotion to less: to the emotional clarity found in the barest forms.
　
There is also a quiet embrace of wabi-sabi in his work—the beauty of impermanence, of things half-seen and gently fading. He paints the threshold before daylight arrives, the grasses that grow where the city forgets, the landscapes that flicker into being and then are gone. Not timelessness, but mono no aware: a tender awareness of time passing.
　
Sei Shōnagon once wrote:
“In the morning, nothing is more beautiful than the moment before sunrise, when the sky is still dim and the chill of night lingers.”
　
Finn’s paintings carry that same hush. They do not declare, but observe. In their quiet, we sense a way of moving through the world—carefully, attentively, without rush.