Sophie Thynne’s painting is led by colour, “I just see colours that I like,” she says. “It might be from life or from somebody else’s painting. Or a new tube of paint. Sometimes I see a tiny little bit in a Gauguin, for example, and I try to recreate that colour.” In her growing body of work, it’s this love of colour that is her primary impulse. What happens next on the canvas is the addition of the narrative: a person, an animal or a tree, an object that she loves. It may be a dream, a poem she read twenty years ago. It’s these images, the fragments of story, shards of life that punctuate Thynne’s work and make her paintings at once playful and compassionate. It’s the dance between visual storytelling and colour that characterises her distinctive style.

Born in London in 1968, Thynne’s upbringing was, as with so much in her life and work, a balance between old world tradition and bohemian exploration. Roaming the halls of Longleat as a child she was always aware of the Old Masters and numinous paintings. “Titians and Turners were everywhere,” she laughs. “Dark and heavy and dusty. I found them quite depressing. So, I rebelled and now I tend to run to colour.”

Now, decades later, that early exposure lingers in her sensitivity to tone and atmosphere, though her palette couldn’t be further from the sombre grandeur of her childhood surroundings. “Art was the only thing I liked and was good at growing up,” she says. “My dad used to put on classical music and tell me to draw what I saw. Otherwise, I didn’t have any formal training. Sometimes I wish I’d been to art school, but I also like that I’m teaching myself as I go. I don’t belong to a school. I don’t like it when it’s clear who taught you.”

This independence of practise and spirit lends Thynne’s paintings their freshness and powerful emotional impact.  Her upcoming exhibition, New Works, at Crean & Company in London this November, brings together eighteen recent pieces that move between story, symbol and sensation. “Each painting,” she says, “begins with an impulse, every picture is either a story or an object. It could come from a dream, a sentence in a novel, or even my word puzzle app. I love the shape of a computerised landscape and might want to paint it. I never know what will show up in my paintings.”

Thynne’s sources are varied but consistent in their emotional charge. One painting was inspired by a scene in a Molly Keane novel, Two Days in Aragon. A clumsy bride falls from a balcony on her wedding night and her husband releases two swans as a memorial. “That image just wouldn’t leave my head,” she says. Another “Walt Whitman with Butterflies in his Beard” came from a line in Federico Garcia Lorca’s Ode to Walt Whitman. Whitman is remembered as “a man with butterflies in his beard and corduroy shoulders worn thin by the moon.” “I read it twenty years ago,” Thynne says, “but that picture has stayed in me all that time.”

Similarly, the moon is a constant in her recent work. “I don’t know why the moon comes to me” she admits, laughing, “maybe because it’s always there.” It makes an appearance in several paintings in her latest exhibition, “Essaouira at Night” and “Crazy Night in Clapham.” The latter painting is the visual rendition of a typical Sophie tale of sleeping in her cousin’s garden shed in London and “waking in the night to foxes galloping over the roof, terrible mating cries like children screaming. Cats meowing, leaves rustling. A crazy jungle.” The autobiographical thread is never far away in Thynne’s work.

Earlier paintings were dominated by a recurring girl, sometimes hanging from a cliff edge, sometimes sitting on a coffin. “When my parents died the girl was obviously me,” she says, “In my most recent work she shows up as “Good and Bad Girl.” This figure reflects the artist’s struggle between saintliness and troublemaking, and how both can survive alongside one another.”

This wry wit is typical of Thynne and it runs through her conversation as much as her paintings. “I spent a lot of time going spectacularly off the rails,” she says of her past, “which means now there’s a sense of urgency about my work. I love painting but I’m not too precious. I feel time pressing in and want to paint as much as I can.”

Thynne’s working day in her Gloucestershire studio is disciplined and unremarkable - strong coffee, music or a podcast, and long hours at the easel. The iPad has become an unexpected ally, a digital sketchbook where she experiments freely before moving to canvas. “It gives me the confidence to start something bigger,” she says. Though self-taught, Thynne speaks about painting with the ease of someone who has looked deeply and widely. Her influences range from the modern to the mystical: Milton Avery for “colour, shape, no fuss,” Gertrude Abercrombie for “stories and magic.” From Matisse she takes “boldness, beauty and naivety” and from Elizabeth Blackadder “charm, delicacy and colour.” She admires the boldness of Henry Curchod, the compositions of Gwyneth Johnstone, and the quiet mystery of Anne Rothenstein. Tom Anholt, Tom Hammick, Peter Doig, and Andreas Eriksson also feature in her constellation of influences.

At the centre of that wide circle sits the clear influence of Craigie Aitchison. “I always come back to Craigie.” she says. “Craigie was in my life when I was younger, my parents knew him. He gave my husband and I a print when we got married, a little tree with some birds in it. I just loved it. His sensitivity comes through the pictures.”

Thynne’s art might appear whimsical and mystical - bright colours, moonlit landscapes, mythic symbols, but it’s also grounded in experience, the autobiographical undercurrents refracting the events of her life. A trip to Spain produced not landscapes but a small wooden saint she couldn’t stop thinking about. “I went to Spain on a painting trip to be inspired by the landscape,” she says, “but every night there was this tiny kitsch saint on the shelf in my room. I became obsessed with it. When I came back, that was what stayed with me. I’ve painted it twice now.”

Travel continues to nourish her imagination: the light of Morocco, the sea of Ireland, her perennial love of Spain where she fled in her youth to study Flamenco dance and ended up working at the Marlborough Gallery. Yet for all the outward references, Sophie Thynne’s paintings feel interior and deeply private. But while once they might have featured her own private exploration of grief, now there is a breadth of vision, a self-assurance and awareness of the world around her that exemplifies her growing maturity as an artist. “My paintings are symbolic,” she says. “But they’re also me.”

From the dusty grandeur of English country houses to the stillness and light of her Gloucestershire studio, Thynne has forged her own path away from the paintings she found so oppressive as a child. Her works are colourful acts of recognition of beauty, loss, humour and the passage of time. Like the moon she is so transfixed by, they shift between story and colour, captivating the imagination and the eye along the way.