Contemporary Artists | Period Artists (A-H) | Period Artists (H-Z)

Hugo Grenville

TRESCO GARDENS, EASTER, LATE AFTERNOON Oil on canvas, 48 x 54 inches

Born in 1958, Hugo Grenville is a leading British Romantic painter whose dreamy paintings reveal a spiritual intensity.  In their exploration of color harmony, and in their celebration of pattern making, they peel back layers of feeling.  The figure subjects and the everyday objects that surround them provide the inspiration to express the joy in life of light and color.  The world around us becomes a poem that reveals something about how it feels rather than how it looks.

Hugo's paintings of the female figure are invested with a conscious subjectivity and illuminates the fragility of humanity, and our longing for a better world.

"The sea does not have to be the blue that you saw," explains Hugo, "It can be pink or it might be red or it might be violet.  There is this sense that we can use color as a tool for linking the viewer with the emotional experience of being in the landscape."

Hugo describes himself as essentially a colorist - his palette is bright and jaunty. Lemon yellow, violet, mauve and pale blue are colors that appear regularly in his paintings. His vibrant paintings reflect the influence of Matisse.

Hugo Grenville was a soldier, then an art dealer before becoming a full time painter in 1989. Since first exhibiting in London in 1974, Hugo has had many one man exhibitions. His works hang in many private and public collections around the world.

Major commissions have included working in Bosnia as a war artist, in an iron foundry for the Millennium Project and portraits of leading figures.

Several years ago the Grenvilles moved from London to the Red House in Waveney Valley in Suffolk. The house, dating back to 1650, still had its lovely Georgian façade and beautiful old shutters, as well as many other period details.  At first immobilized by the sheer scale of the project, Hugo soon applied his passion for color to the interior.  He chose colors the Georgians would have used such as peacock green, duck egg blue and violet.

The interior of the Red House has provided the backgrounds for most of Grenville's interior and still life paintings.  His landscapes and seascapes have been inspired by the Suffolk coast, focusing on the water meadows near the Red House.

Hugo's vast garden studio is where he paints ceaselessly.  In the summers it is shared with the students he teaches.  He sees teaching as a way of putting back into the world something he has taken out. "I find doing teaching incredibly stimulating and rewarding. It takes me out of my internal world." He has taught painting for more than 10 years and is a popular and exhilarating teacher and lecturer, being very knowledgeable about art history and his conversation is studded with interesting nuggets of information that invite discussion. His talks on Color and Twentieth Century Painting have inspired many.

Hugo also writes regularly on painting for The Artist Magazine. Looking at his work from the early 1990's, he says he remains surprised at how much it has changed over the years from dark earthy tones, characterizing his period in London, to the bright, cheerful, color palette he uses today.  It's an optimistic world, full of color and light.