Gill Bustamante is a Sussex-based artist, known for her large, original oil paintings of landscapes and seascapes, and figures from nature. Her style blends the near-abstract with the traditional, the expressionist with the impressionist, for a unique aesthetic that she terms ‘Memory Impressionism’.
Bustamante’s artistic career stretches back as far as she can remember: as a child she would draw and paint animals from books every single day. After attaining an art foundation from Chelsea and Fine Art Sculpture Degree from Brighton, Bustamante worked for a number of years as a professional artist, taking commissions for bespoke portraits.
More recently, Bustamante has developed her own, experimental ‘Memory Impressionism’, a quasi-mystical approach that harnesses the beauty of the natural world to create escapist spaces on the canvas: enchanting and dreamy landscapes for her viewer to get lost in.
Her work is inspired by her walks in the Sussex countryside, listening to the sounds the of the earth as they have persisted over millennia, and tapping the rich vein of memories retained in places, to create uplifting and humanitarian artworks.
Artist Statement
My name is Gill Bustamante and I paint large contemporary landscape and seascape paintings in oil on canvas. They are mostly inspired by the Sussex landscapes I see around me where I live. My painting style is a fusion of Expressionist, Impressionist, Semi-abstract, Art Nouveau and something I term ‘memory impressionism’. This is where I go walking somewhere rural, look at and absorb the things I see and experience, and then come home and try to capture an 'echo' of the place from memory, including any wildlife I may have seen. I completed a have a fine art degree in Brighton in 1983 and I have painted since I was three. It always makes me happy along with cake, bunnies, driving erratically, BBC 6 music and totally irreverent comedy.
