Gill Bustamante

UK-based artist Gill Bustamante creates luminous, expressive paintings where wildlife, landscape, memory, and imagination converge. Her forests, fields, and animals are rooted in real places, yet transformed into dreamlike worlds of color, movement, and light.

Bustamante’s fascination with animals began in childhood, when she taught herself to draw by copying horses and wildlife from books. She went on to study Fine Art Sculpture at Brighton, graduating in 1983, and later spent more than fifteen years developing her skills as a classical animal and portrait painter.

Eventually, she began searching for something beyond realism. Walking became an essential part of that discovery. Moving through ancient woods and open countryside, she describes slipping “out of time”—immersed in birdsong, shifting light, and the feeling that landscapes carry traces of everything that has passed through them.

These experiences now shape her paintings. Working primarily from memory, supported by photographs of wildlife, Bustamante creates places that feel both familiar and enchanted: a forest glimpsed through mist, a horse emerging from light, a path leading somewhere just beyond sight.

Her paintings are less about depicting a landscape than capturing the feeling of being there—that fleeting moment when the natural world seems to become something larger, stranger, and more magical.

Through her art, Bustamante offers the viewer a temporary escape from the everyday and an invitation to wander somewhere beautiful.