Hugo Grenville squints into the wind and sweeps his hand across the open vista of the rural Suffolk countryside. Over there, where his teenage sons are tending to a bonfire, will be the extension to the house. To the right, overlooking fields that stretch into the horizon, he plans to have an art studio with space for a dozen or more summer art students.
 

Space. You can almost feel a weight lifting off Hugo Grenville as he revels in the vastness of a world that had been home to his family in the late 1990s and to which he now plans their return. Back in 1996 he and his wife Sophie had taken a derelict Georgian property in Mendham and turned it into the venue for Hugo’s summer school. Nine years later they sold up to return to London where Hugo set up a  studio in a converted chocolate factory. Now they’re back, having bought an equally neglected farm house on the outskirts of an East Suffolk village not far from their old home.
 

‘I’ve missed the landscape,’ Hugo says. ‘I like the wind on my face; I like the feeling that I am being blown about by nature. There’s a big part of me that is a country boy. Standing in the landscape and being a part of it, you become something…if not elemental, then at least you are in the elements. It’s as close as I can get to a sense of creation.’
 

For an artist currently known best for colour-rich oil paintings of still-lifes and romantic  domestic scenes in which models share the canvas with fabrics, furnishings, fruit and flowers, there is no evidence of ‘prettiness’ in Hugo’s newest environment. Instead, he has to navigate building rubble to reach the house for lunch; this, a noisy family meal of steaming pasta served on mis-matched plates and enjoyed in an unpretentious kitchen which only this morning had still been without hot water.

 

Neighbours arrive mid-meal to welcome the family and Hugo admits to not knowing he had a letter box…never mind seeing a leaflet they had popped into it. After a bit of chat the visitors move on and the family resumes its discussions of orchards, new beds, schools and measuring tapes.

 

In this disheveled but eminently affable atmosphere, a picture begins to emerge of Hugo Grenville. On the one hand he commands up to £20,000 per painting with images that capture the endlessness of small, dreamy moments in time; on the other he appears to welcome…and perhaps even need…intense intervals of upheaval and change.

 

Now in his early fifties, Hugo didn’t come into professional painting until relatively late in life. When he was fresh out of school he travelled to India and there happily used up what money he had. This was followed by a return to the UK where he tried unsuccessfully to apply for a job at Sotheby’s. They suggested he gain a bit of life experience first; advice he took to heart by signing up with the army and serving in the Coldstream Guards, leaving as a Captain five years later.

 

His tours of duty sent him to Northern Ireland and a number of African nations, but army life was not for a young man who dreamed of being an artist and in 1982 he joined advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, only to find himself trapped in what was, for him, a mind-numbingly boring environment. 

 

‘When I left the army I already knew I really wanted to paint, but at 25 I didn’t have the courage to launch myself as a painter,’ he explains. ‘So, after the advertising job, a friend and I set up an art dealership together and every Wednesday during term time I went to paint with Elizabeth Jane Lloyd.’

 

Elizabeth Jane Lloyd, now deceased, was best known for a ‘natural generosity of spirit’ in her paintings and it was this influence which enveloped Hugo for the four years he studied under her. Emboldened by his burgeoning success at exhibitions as well as by his mentor’s gentle, lyrical approach to painting and life, he chose in 1989 to finally become a professional painter and to embrace a style of painting which too would becoming increasingly emotionally-driven.

 

To begin with, Hugo focused on what he describes as ‘loosely a post-Sickert’ style: earthy palette, social realism, London subject matter. It was a style that placed him comfortably in Messum’s in London, with whom he would enjoy seven exhibitions between 1997 and 2005. 

 

By 2001, however, he had become increasingly frustrated with his art; he felt he needed a new direction if he was to progress. Sensing that Continental art may hold some answers, he attended a Fauve retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris and was stunned by what he found. ‘It was a revelation. It was a turning point,’ he says enthusiastically of the works of expressionist artists such as Henri Matisse, André Derain and Raoul Dufy. ‘I knew then that I wanted to embrace a much more inventive, more relaxed and more individual vision.’

 

A chance introduction to American gallery Wally Findlay – who   represented Bonnard and Dufy – has enabled Hugo to pursue this new direction. ‘It you compared my studio now with two or three years ago, you’d see an enormous difference. It’s not because I wanted to end up an abstract painter, but I wanted to find a voice that would allow me to express the things I felt strongly about, in a recognisable painterly language. But, as an artist, you have to invent your own   language, that’s the hard part. It’s a lifetime project.’

 

While still pursuing his paintings in his trademark ‘decorative context’, he seeks to ‘reinvent the image so that it becomes a poem, a celebration of colour and design. To get to that you have to try a whole range of things: simplifying, distorting, changing your working practice.’

 

In Hugo’s case, this experimental approach has also included learning to paint with his left hand. In the last six months he has developed a painful cartilage condition which will require surgery, but for now he is treating this development as a happy accident. He has learned to paint almost anything with his left hand, producing a freer style that contributes to his newfound, simplified and abstracted style.

 

Hugo is aware that a tension exists in his work: ‘One half of me wants to be an abstract expressionist, making huge gestural marks with lots of paint, unfussed by detail; another part of me is a fabric designer by nature who is fascinated by pattern and little marks. That’s been my battle, to try and synthesize those two things. I love the female form, flowers, decorative things, but I want to suggest these things in a more relaxed, economical way. I want my pictures to flow in and out, to be in and out of focus simultaneously.’

 

The hardest thing, he says, ‘is to let go of everything you have learned, even the things you learned in primary school, and to express yourself in a way that is individual and has absolute conviction and integrity.’

 

According to Wally Findlay’s chairman and CEO,  James Borynack, collectors in the United States respond very well to Hugo’s ‘unique and tactful mix of several Modernist and Nabis concepts. He is an accomplished colorist who uses many different types of applications to create effects that maintain a sense of freshness throughout the entire composition. His manipulation of space and use of pattern speaks to those clients who enjoy Matisse and the modern school that followed him; while his use of colour and the many ways in which he treats it (both physically and conceptually) appeal to those clients whose sensibility is in line with the Nabis masters such as Bonnard and Vuillard.’

 

Hugo’s plan for the foreseeable future is to continue developing his new language while straddling both London and Suffolk, at least until the building work in St James, near Halesworth, is complete, the    gardens laid out and the summer school has a chance to establish itself. 

 

Like Elizabeth Jane Lloyd, Hugo loves to teach; hence his ongoing commitment to setting aside a month a year in which he runs intensive week-long classes. Most recently he has been publishing articles about his Theory of the Palette, analogising colour choice to music: ‘In the same way that you place notes in a key, so you place colours in a particular palette. You have to have the equivalent of melodies and harmonies. What you can’t do is write a piece of music that has every key and it’s the same thing with colour, you have to restrict hugely the exotic range of pigments.’

 

To get to the point in his life where he is now, with a new vision he can only hope his collectors will appreciate, and a massive building project to get his arms around, he confesses has been a frightening journey and he hopes a summer in Suffolk spent painting landscapes – something he has not done much of since working in London – will consolidate what, in his gut, he knows is the right decision. ‘I will keep London going for a few more years but, yes, all this is uncharted     territory,’ he says, breathing deeply. ‘I’ve got huge plans and I’m looking forward to it.’