Jonathan Hynd was born in October 1950 in Manchester, England, as the son of an English diplomat, Jack Hynd (1903 – 1951). Jonathan Hynd and his sister spent their first stages of development in Khartoum, Sudan were oftentimes cared for by locals around the city. Following the early death of their father, the family returned to Britain to live with their grandmother in Lancashire while their mother sought out for work in London. Hynd was then privately educated at traditional English boarding schools. After having graduated Winchester College, Jonathan Hynd went on to work at the London Stock Exchange, but contracted para-typhoid fever before having been able to attend.

With the help from a friend, Jonathan Hynd received an opportunity to live and work in New York at Kidder Peabody on Wall Street. Hynd then left for France to study at the Université Grenoble-Alpes, teaching English and learning French.

From 1971 – 1973, Jonathan Hynd studied at the Thames Polytechnic in London before joining the Architectural Association. There, the artist was exposed to successful and dynamic professionals such as Zaha Hadid and Keith Critchlow who both had passions for sacred geometry and the building of highly efficient, almost transcendental spaces.

In 1974, Jonathan Hynd embarked on a series of extensive travels throughout Italy, North Africa, Turkey, and Afghanistan; before employment in Tehran, Iran, under the supervision of Dr. Bahktiar and his associates for several months. Spiritually impacted by Islamic visual culture and philosophy, Hynd curiously embraced the anionic and ideas of an infinite, divine power within art – thus ultimately fuelling his transition from architect to painter.

In 1978, Hynd enrolled at the St. Martin’s School of Art to complete a foundation course in painting. Jonathan Hynd worked alone in his studio in North London for three years thereafter, experimenting with conte crayon and charcoal, challenging his institutional background and working to discover his personal “handwriting.”

Jonathan Hynd emerged with his Master’s Degree in Painting at Goldsmith’s College in 1983 and quickly sojourned to Italy. While in Rome, Jonathan Hynd was introduced to Luisa Guarneri, a talented journalist from Sicily, who he eventually married. Guarneri followed the artist-architect to London as he was burdened with the task of needing to transform the studio space into a marketable home. Once construction was complete and the property was sold in 1987, the couple relocated to Rome and eventually claimed permanent residency in Trastevere.

Settling in Rome inspired a shift of interests towards exploring unconventional and found material – street detritus and raw pigments which fell from ancient monument’s walls – and heavily inspired by the dense, physical layering of the Eternal City, and the juxtaposed delicacy of the works by Renaissance Masters. After several successful exhibitions within the artist’s key period of creative growth (1993 – 2014), the pace of the artist’s life gradually became more concentrated, but did not slow. As Jonathan Hynd and Luisa Guarneri worked to mutually support each other’s careers, this enabled him to embrace a sense of steadiness within life and work, as well as the building of a close social circle and subsequent, collaborative founding of Studi Aperti (1997 – 2000).

In 2021, Luisa Guarneri passed away due to a form of persistent and aggressive form of cancer. Throughout a painful 15 years of his partner’s illness, this took significant effect on the artist’s work and drove him to experiment with less familiar, subconscious and enigmatic themes within painting – thus defining a second, critical period of the artist’s stylistic career.

Aged 75, Jonathan Hynd continues to live and work in Monteverde Vecchio and has more recently embraced the “role of the artist” within today’s historical setting (2026). He continues to experiment with new media with a focus on casting, sculpture, and writing.