Hugo Winder-Lind, reed thin with a neat whip of hair and an enviable dress sense makes art we want on our wall. We fell in love with his surreal dreamlike paintings at his opening at Troze gallery in Cornwall; brush strokes revealing hazy cloud lands, dancing men, copper coloured nature with hints of fire and menace and wanted to find out a little more about his process. Hugo was nice enough to oblige us...

You recently had a show at Troze in Penzance Cornwall, how did you feel after the show?

‘I’m really happy to have worked with Troze. I love so many of the artists that have shown work with them recently. It’s a real honor to show my work in Cornwall alongside Cornish artists. It was fantastic that Troze gave me that much space and creative license to show my work. I owe a lot to Cornwall for its land and soul; so much of the landscape has got into my work, so it makes sense. It feels odd to leave the studio and the work. That’s a really hard feeling to get over. When I’m working, my head gets in a certain place, and that’s hard to switch off.’

Your work tends to be quite small scale, although recently you painted a large scale piece entitled, ‘’The Telepathic Field” is there a reason you prefer to work in smaller format?

‘I think for this exhibition, I had a bit of time to curate the whole show the way I wanted it. So the smaller work all kind of fits together, and then 'The Telepathic Field' had to have the scale to be able to dominate the overall narrative. They both have different uses; the smaller work needs your attention to really blossom; you need to see it up close, the larger one is much more about tying everything together. Working small means you can cover a lot of ground quicker in terms of composition, and in this series, I was paying a lot of attention to it.’

What does an average (if there is one) day in your studio look like?

‘I’m currently between studios. It’s difficult to get a good studio space in Brighton, I’ve spent the summer working in my garden, I’ve built a space out there which I use, but I’ll be moving to a new studio hopefully in October. I guess on average, I work quite early, I have a lot of focus in the morning, then eat lunch and walk, usually by the cliffs and then run some errands if that needs doing, then work for the rest of the afternoon.

I realised recently that work comes when I let myself rest, and not push it. There’s times when you need to push yourself, obviously, but resting, taking space to breathe, that’s helped me loads. There’s a routine there, but I’m not rigid, if somethings not working I’ll go and do something else, it’s hard though. I guess I’ve lost more pieces to overworking than I have got pieces of unfinished work.'

Your paintings feel like the same characters on different journeys would you agree?

'Yeah, I think in this series, they all kind of spill out of the same place. I wasn’t really thinking too much about their symbolic value, I knew what they signify to me, but more about how they interact, their gestures, how they move, how they behave with each other. But they’re all the same person. They’re all parts of me; The sheep, landscapes, the colours, the brush marks.'

Your artwork seems to celebrate the natural world; the clouds, stars, rust stained earth. What would you say are key themes in your work?

When I make paintings, they’re made for the medium. Oil paintings are oil paintings because that medium means something in itself. Oil paint made to look like clouds has an inherent poetry to it, trying to get liquid oil paints to look like moving bodies and solid structures is addictive. I think it’s really important to keep your mind and body in a certain way whilst you’re painting.

What are you working on currently?

‘The season hasn’t quite changed yet, so I’m letting the summer sit for a while. I’m drawing, writing, making paintings, and taking more photographs, working on projects I can’t fully disclose, mostly because the devil fools with the best-laid plans, so I like to keep them quiet until they’re unveiled. Always drawing, observing, and collaborating. I get out in the garden a lot and move things around or just observe. We just found two fish in our pond, which kind of came out of nowhere, which is odd considering I dug the pond myself. It feels good to be able to nurture a bit of land, even though it’s tiny.’

What’s something people don’t know about you?

‘I don’t read much. I think a lot of people think I read a lot. I’d like to read more, but I’m dyslexic, so reading and writing mess me up. I get most of my information through listening to people talking, through touch and physical learning, but I'd like to read more.’

If you could have a painting from another artist what would it be?

‘This I don’t know, it depends on how I’d get it I suppose, I feel like that’s important. If I dug up an ancient rock painting, that would be special. But right now, I don’t have space for a painting to honor it as much as I’d like. I feel like you really have to find the right place for things to live. My wife Nina and I have some of Daisy Rickman’s paintings, which I love, and some work from Nooka Shepherd. I pretty much want anything those guys do. Tom Rickman’s paintings are amazing; I would like one of them one day. Or something from Odilon Redon, or Austin Osman Spare. There’s so much incredible work out there at the moment, and so much I haven’t seen yet in the flesh; maybe I can answer that next time I see something I like.’

To follow Hugo’s latest work and up coming exhibitions click here.

You can request his latest Catalogue from Troze Gallery click here.

Hugo is wearing the Ariane scarf

Interview by Verity Pemberton, founder of Moon Magazine

Photographs by Amelia Pemberton