Artist’s Description

The Owls Haven is a magical realism style semi-abstract landscape of a vibrant English spring landscape. It is 40 x 30 x 1.5 inches. The painting shows a glowing white barn owl flying across a bluebell meadow. She is in the shadows of trees at the top of a hill on a late spring afternoon. The owl is partly luminous as she catches a beam of light on her face. She is flying towards a glowing green clearing seen in a V shaped valley in the distance. The background of the painting is dark maroon purple which contrasts in interesting ways with the blues, pinks, greens and magentas of April blossom and bluebells. There are shimmering vertical stokes of colour which make the landscape quite ethereal and fairy tale like. This painting was inspired by a real place near where I live in East Sussex. I can hear the owl in this area in the evenings sometimes but have not seen her. This is my capture of this place as it has crystallized in my mind. Painted on deep edge canvas, maroon edges, ready to hang and comes with certificate of authenticity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_LHx8W9MEM

Collector’s Insight

The Owls Haven is among Bustamante’s most compositionally inventive works. The structure is bold and asymmetric: a deep maroon-purple field dominates the canvas, streaked with shimmering vertical marks in blue, teal, and mauve that give the surface an almost rain-like quality — as though the painting itself is dissolving at its edges into something less material. Against this, two zones of clarity emerge: the barn owl, precisely rendered in warm cream and gold, catching a beam of light as she banks in flight; and a small, luminous V-shaped valley in the upper right, where a realistic English summer landscape — sunlit green fields, trees, a pale sky — glows like a window into another world entirely.

The tension between these registers is what makes the painting exceptional. The owl is the bridge between the abstract field and the real landscape beyond, a living creature moving between two ways of seeing. Bustamante has said she hears this owl but has never seen her — and that biographical detail gives the work its emotional core. This is not a painting of a place as it is, but as it has become in the imagination: crystallised, luminous, slightly beyond reach.

Collectors drawn to magical realism, wildlife painting with genuine painterly ambition, and works that hold the observed and the imagined in productive tension will find The Owls Haven a deeply original and enduring acquisition. Its large landscape format and rich palette give it commanding presence.

Materials & Presentation

• Original oil painting on deep edge canvas
• Artist: Gill Bustamante
• Artwork size: 40 × 30 inches (approximately 101.6 × 76.2 cm), depth 1.5 inches (approximately 3.8 cm)
• Maroon painted edges — ready to hang unframed
• Certificate of authenticity included