Gill Bustamante

I am a professional artist based in East Sussex who creates large semi-abstract landscape, seascape, and wildlife paintings in oil on canvas. My painting style is very distinct and fuses Art Nouveau, Impressionist, and semi-abstract techniques with traditional portraiture that reflect my love of nature, animals, birds, and the flora and fauna of the landscapes around me.

My main working method has been the development of a painting style I term ‘memory impressionism’. This method involves going walking somewhere, looking at and absorbing the things I see and experience, and then returning home to my studio to try and capture an echo or essence of the place from memory—including any wildlife I may have seen. By this method, I can capture essences and echoes of places and the feelings I have about them. I love the ancient landscapes of England, and my paintings often reflect the spiritual elements that such landscapes have.

Bio
As a child, I taught myself to draw and paint by copying pictures from wildlife and horse books on an almost daily basis. The skills I acquired were added to throughout school and art college. However, my first real introduction to life as a working artist began after leaving art college when I discovered that the Brighton art galleries and the local job centre did not, at once, sign me up for a glittering career as an artist.

In the job centre, when I informed my consultant that I had a Fine Art degree, the lady laughed sympathetically and then offered me a job as a chambermaid (which I took). In the art galleries I visited, I was told I needed to be an ‘emerging’ or ‘mid-career’ artist in order for them to be interested. I tried to convince them I had, in fact, ‘emerged’ at age 3, but my reasoning failed to impress. Like millions before me, I discovered the well-known issue of needing to be ‘a name’ before becoming ‘a name’.

However, regardless of not winning the Turner Prize or being Picasso, I continued to draw and paint and regularly took part in or organized exhibitions where I sold work or received commissions. In the 1990s, I met an art agent who traveled the area selling animal portrait commissions, and I became one of the artists he represented. This was excellent experience, as it demanded I learn some formal portrait painting techniques.

Commissions continued to be my main income source until around 2010, when I first began to sell art online. The success I had with this gave me the opportunity to spend more time developing new ideas and techniques and, for the first time in my career, I painted for my own pleasure—eventually developing a distinctive style of my own.

I am a self-representing artist. Although I am happy to work with galleries and agents occasionally, I prefer to remain in control of my own creativity.

Education
I have A-levels in Art and Art History from Erith Tech (1977–79). I then took a foundation art course at Chelsea (1979–1980), and later completed a Fine Art degree in Brighton in 1983. I am also a trained adult education art teacher (Certificate 730).