- Gill Bustamante
- Landscape Artist
- East Sussex. United Kingdom.
ABOUT GILL:
Gill Bustamante is a professional artist based in East Sussex who creates large semi-abstract landscape, seascape and wildlife paintings in oil on canvas. Her painting style is very distinct and often fuses art-nouveau, expressionist and semi-abstract techniques with traditional portraiture that reflect her love of nature, animals, birds, and the flora and fauna of the landscapes around her. Her main working method has been the development of a painting style she terms ‘memory impressionism’. This method involves going walking somewhere, looking at and absorbing the things she sees and experiences, and then returning home to her studio to try and capture an echo or essence of the place from memory – including any wildlife she may have seen. By this method, she captures essences and echoes of places and the feeling she has about them. She loves the ancient landscapes of England and her paintings often reflect the magical elements that such landscape have.
As a child, Gill taught herself to draw and paint by copying pictures from wildlife and horse books on an almost daily basis and the skills she acquired were added to throughout school and college. However, Gill’s first real introduction to the life as a working artist began on leaving college when she discovered that the Brighton art galleries and the local job centre did not at once sign her up for a glittering career as an artist. In the job center, when she told her consultant she had an art degree, the lady laughed sympathetically and then offered her a job as a chambermaid (which she took).
In the art galleries she visited, she was told she needed to be an ‘emerging’ or ‘mid-career’ artist in order for them to be interested. She tried to convince them she had, in fact, ‘emerged’ at age 3 but the pitch failed to impress and so like millions before her she hit the catch 22 of needing to be ‘a name’ before she was ‘a name’.
However, regardless of not winning the Turner prize or being Picasso, Gill continued to draw and to paint and regularly took part in or organized exhibitions where she sold her work or was given
commissions. In the 1990s Gill met an art agent who travelled the area selling animal portrait commissions and Gill became one of the artists he represented which was excellent experience as it demanded she learn classical portrait painting techniques. Commissions continued as Gill’s main income source until around 2010 when Gill first began to sell her art online. The early success she had on this gave her the opportunity to spend more time developing new ideas and techniques and for the first time in her career she painted for her own pleasure, eventually developing a distinctive style of her own. Gill is a self-representing artist as although she is happy to work with galleries and agents occasionally, she prefers to remain in control of her own career.
ARTWORKS FOR SALE BY GILL BUSTAMANTE