About the Artist

Virginia Beach, Virginia artist Bobbi Gunn specializes in coastal landscape and bird paintings.

She has grown up painting, but, living with a salt marsh in her backyard has given her and her art a new, exciting perspective on the beauty of nature. This is her inspiration.

Whether kayaking the river, observing the wildlife from the pier behind her home, or hiking through the beautiful nearby state park, she is aware of the countless ways that our natural world changes. Using a camera she tries to capture the fleeting moments and use these as references for her paintings. Working with oil, pastel and gouache, a painting is usually a composition of many source photos as well as her own sketches as well as a lifetime of observation.

The artists that have inspired her are John Singer Sargent, Degas, Turner and Winslow Homer.  She also goes way back to the wonderful watercolors and gouache paintings of Albrecht Durer.  The beauty and skill of "The Large Tuft of Grass" and "A Hare" have always been favorites. But, when she went to the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming and saw the amazing wildlife art

there, she was hooked.  The paintings of Carl Rungius, Robert Bateman, Michael Coleman, and Jamie Wyeth were unforgetable.  Trying to combine the realism of Durer to depict an animal, but also use the  colors and brushwork of Sargent for a landscape is a challenge, but one that keeps her painting.

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