Press Image Pack for Cricket Fine Art March 2023 Exhibition from Hugo Grenville

PRESS RELEASE: Grenville London solo show.
Britain’s Leading Impressionist offers his finest paintings to date

We live in troubling times. Chaos abounds at home, abroad there is war and repression. Some artists choose to comment on the strife and struggle they observe around them, others choose to find meaning in intimacy. In 1943, when Nazi jackboots strutted down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, both Bonnard and Matisse, whose studios were only a few kilometres away, elected to lift their heads beyond the daily horror of the Occupation; instead they were hard at work on a series of paintings of domestic subjects: garden scenes, still life arrangements and figure studies, explorations of glorious colour harmonies that exude a robust optimism in the face of danger and despair, paintings which express a full-blooded sense of existence through the transforming power of colour and light.
Although I started out as a sort of social commentator in paint 30 years ago (David Messum once promoted me as a 'modern day Hogarth, in the style of Sickert') my painter’s journey has taken me, via the expressive language of French Post-Impressionism, into the rich pastures of English Romanticism. In a world where satire and irony tend to predominate, I intend my work to stand as a passionate defence of beauty and domestic harmony, as a symbol of hope and promise. The collection of paintings in this exhibition, all made over the last couple of years, share in a common a quest to conjure the lyrical and the dreamlike, to present an inner world at peace with itself. To achieve this, I have tended to work away from the subject, allowing memory and reflection to seep into the process, so that each picture is a distillation of experience, a reinvention of my imagination, rather than a straight record of a place or an arrangement of objects. By restricting the colours in my palettes to only one or two primaries and one or two secondaries, I have been able to better explore colour harmony, which seems to me to work in a similar way to the keys in music, where the greatest expressiveness is achieved within a restricted hierarchy of notes.
The pictures in this catalogue are largely inspired by my home and garden, and by two much loved areas of countryside: the wild, romantic shoreline of the Cornish coast, and the deep sultriness of the Midi. But all the paintings here, the figure subjects, the interiors and the landscapes, have at their heart the principal intention to deploy the abstract elements of picture making – the arrangements of shape, colour, line, pattern, and the sense of light achieved through variation in tonal values – in the pursuit of exploring timelessness, of connecting us to time past, present and future, to both the visible world and the invisible.
Preview of Grenville’s London Exhibition is on Tuesday 14 March at Cricket Fine Art 6-8pm.

For more information visit Hugo’s website www.hugogrenville.com

Press Contact
Angie Porter
Assistant to Hugo Grenville
EMAIL assistant@hugogrenville.com
ADDRESS
Studio Hugo Grenville
The Chapel in the Garden
49 East Street
Bridport
Dorset DT6 3JX
England
MOBILE +44 (0) 7796 415 395

VIDEO
Click below to view 'Romantic Vision', a short film about Hugo Grenville
http://bit.ly/hugogrenvillefilm

SOCIAL MEDIA
https://www.facebook.com/StudioHugoGrenville https://www.instagram.com/hugogrenville/

 
IMAGES

Hugo Painting his garden in West Dorset

View from the terrace in the artist’s garden

Like Monet Hugo’s work is inspired by his garden.

Hugo’s subject is often ‘views through a window’.

Hugo is inspired by the Dorset landscape.