Gabriella Buckingham

Gabriella has always lived in East Anglia living in Essex, Suffolk and for the last 2o years about 20 minutes drive from Cromer in North Norfolk with her husband, photographer Tony Buckingham and two children. She lives ten minutes from the sea and commutes to work across her untamed garden.

After completing a BA(hons) in Graphic Design at Kingston Polytechnic, as it was then, Gabriella worked for national magazines illustrating everything from broccoli to romantic fiction. For three years she worked as an in-house Christmas artist for International Greetings designing cards and wrapping paper, and subsequently became a product manager for another card company for two years before returning to freelancing. She has illustrated many children’s books and created a children’s gift brand called Moobaacluck.

Since 2019 she committed to her fine art work and at the end of that year took part in my first art fair which was a great success. Since then she has sold many paintings to clients worldwide and locally during Open Studio events; in 2020 pain were longlisted for the Jackson’s Art Prize and The Ashurst Prize. Two other works were selected at the final stages of ING Discerning Eye andThe Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that year. Gabriella's work has been chosen for the Sir John Hurt Prize in Norfolk each time she has entered over the last 5 years and in 2023 she was delighted to learn that both her entries to the The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition were chosen to be hung, where both works sold on opening night. Gabriella also developed two on line art courses on her Braveinpaint.com teaching platform called Ignite Your Art (an Intuitive Landscape collection course) and Experimental Still Life.

Artist Statement

"I'm fascinated by colour, light, and paint itself. In the last few years, I've enjoyed using my intuition just as much as observing the subtle changes of shape and colour as light shifts over a subject. I enjoy a feeling of mystery as I paint, a sort of not knowing what will appear and I feel that there’s a spiritual element in my landscape work. With still-life painting, there is often a relationship or element of humour which appeals to the illustrator in me.

Sometimes my paintings are bold and intuitive; at others, quiet and observed, very much like I am as a person. I’m uncovering what I find exciting to see and make. That could be portraying the way light falls around a small still life in a variety of ways; or the feeling of a wild freedom with the adventure of painting a landscape from imagination and memory. There is an energy of attempting to make the invisible visible in my work. Light always affects colour and form; so most of the time I find myself exploring this whether I am working from life or not.

My work is about exploration and discovery in many ways.

I paint to feel brave and connected to something beyond me. My practice is a quest for the feeling of freedom that painting, at its best, can give you. It’s not always in the dramatic paintings, sometimes it’s in the flow of the instinctive choice of paint the exact colour of light on the curve of a bowl and the elusive way the best paintings seem to make a surprise appearance."