About

I’m Gem. I paint small, moody landscapes that keep drifting towards abstract.

I started two years ago, after a big change. I’d stepped back from a business I’d given everything to, and I needed something that was just mine. So I bought a kids’ set of watercolours, sat by a pool in France for two weeks and doodled. I haven’t stopped since.

The name came the next summer. We went back to the same place and visited Batz-sur-Mer, a salt town on the Atlantic coast, where I saw art made with seawater. Lymington’s a salt town too. We used to make it on the marshes out by the sea wall, where I (infrequently) go running. So I came home and collected my own. The wild bit is the coast here, ragged and weather-beaten. And me, most days.

Most paintings start with a horizon line, something to work against. Then it’s layers of muted colour, oil stick and scratched marks. I try so hard to be grown up and measured. Then I can’t help myself, and in goes a slash of neon pink or red. It’s the most honest part of the painting. It’s what makes them mine.

I paint at my kitchen table most evenings, glass of wine, podcast on, then clear it all away so we can eat. Until this October, nobody outside my family had seen my work. Then people I’d never met bought it at my first fair, and that meant more than the money.

Based in Lymington, Hampshire. Small originals on paper and canvas. Find me on Instagram at @wildsalt_studio and at local fairs.