Melissa Bosano
Melissa is a self-taught artist. Although she has always been creative, after studying art at school in the mid-90s, she didn’t come back to art until 2013 when she joined the local life drawing sessions at the Fine Arts Gallery in Gibraltar. From there she began experimenting with watercolours, eventually combining these with ink sketches.
During the last year, she has been drawn to sketching urban scenes, particularly in the local area. All originals are drawn in lightfast, pigmented ink. Mixed media pieces are enhanced using watercolours, gouache or specialist water-based ink.
Wanda Bush
Wanda is a passionate Gibraltarian artist who has been painting all her life. She finds Gibraltar’s location provides great opportunities for fresh ideas. Wanda studied Fine Art at College and gained valuable experience under the tuition of other local artists such as Willa Vasquez, Olympia Reyes, John Culatto, Vin Mifsud and Ambrose Avellano.
She has always enjoyed painting outdoors and participated in many competitions and exhibitions in Gibraltar, Spain and Italy. Her first Highly Commended award was achieved in 1999 with the Heritage Trust and won 1st Prize in 2018, along with awards from the Fine Arts Association, The Spring Exhibition and the International Exhibition in Gibraltar. Wanda also won the People’s Choice award at an exhibition in the Garrison Library for her painting “The Return”.
Wanda’s first commission was from Raffles Restaurant on Queensway Quay, in 1995, which was subsequently used for their marketing. She has undertaken various large mural commissions in more recent years and assisted her son in his artistic projects (including the street-art mural in the tunnel at Alameda Gardens and the MTV Musical Festival).
In 2000 Wanda was a founding member of the Fine Arts Association which operates from the Fine Arts Gallery in Casemates. An avid lover of all things God created and nature, Wanda is a Christian Artist.
Adam Galloway
Adam worked as a GP for 30 years in Gibraltar. Now retired, he paints because it makes him happy. He has no formal training beyond school but considered both art and architecture as careers before opting for Medicine (the family business). He thoroughly enjoyed trying to keep the local population healthy but retired just short of 60 because he was fairly sure It would be good for his health.
His work is mainly figurative landscape and often locally based. He likes vibrant colour, unusual juxtaposition and perspective, while achieving a consistent style preoccupies at times. To keep painting and improving for as long as possible is the only goal.
Any profits will be donated to local charities.
Geraldine Martinez
Geraldine has been creating art all her life, exploring virtually every artistic medium along the way. It has been argued that design is a skill and art is an innate gift and there is an ongoing debate about where design ends and art begins, but Geraldine is fortunate to combine both these talents in her work. She uses a variety of media, also using her experience as a graphic designer and her use of digital resources to make her artistic mark.
From working in charcoal, pastels, acrylics and oils, Geraldine is now creating portraits and landscapes using the iPad. Geraldine’s favourite genre is life drawing because it is always dynamic and ever changing. It is a great way to practice observation and detail. Regarding influences on her work, she looks to the masters, the post-impressionists in particular. Experimenting with different types of media in an unconventional manner appeals to Geraldine who wants to provoke thought in people viewing her work. Using a variety of digital techniques such as Photoshop, she manipulates and ‘peels back the layers’ of a photograph to create a painterly effect, similar to watercolours, and her iPad paintings are full of colour and bold strokes, much in the same vein as her real-life canvases.
Demetrovics Orsolya
Orsolya was born in Hungary and moved to Gibraltar in 2021. She is a self-taught artist and has been passionate about painting since she was a child. Orsolya studied psychology and she uses art as a tool for helping her patients to understand, accept and heal their own feelings.
For Orsolya, painting is a kind of meditation that makes her feel balanced. She started to paint with acrylics a few years ago and it soon became her preferred medium. She hopes that her paintings will make others feel as happy as she is when she is creating them.