Olivia Lomenech Gill

Olivia Lomenech Gill has a first class degree in Theatre from Hull University and an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts. For the past twenty years she has lived and worked as a professional fine artist. She divides her time between Northumberland and her husband’s homeland of Brittany and her work has been exhibited at all the major London Art Fairs.

In 2009 after a chance meeting with writer Michael Morpurgo at a small book festival in Brittany, Olivia started her first illustration commission, the result was Where My Wellies Take Me, published in 2012 by Templar publishing, it was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal and won the English Association Picture Book Award. Since then, Olivia has completed more illustration commissions for several leading writers and poets, Francesca Simon, Kathleen Jamie, Katrina Porteous, Ted Hughes and J K Rowling and also created original artwork for Michael Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse".

’There is a wildwood spirit about Olivia’s work. She seems to be in touch with an inventiveness that everyday life knocks out of most people, as we toil through adulthood. She knows it’s not easy to keep that spirit alive, and consequently there is a determined joy in her work, a playfulness with hidden gravity.

 Animals and children are Olivia’s touchstones, all living creatures in fact, in their various landscapes. There are some imagined beasts too, but living ones triumph.  Olivia calls herself ‘an untaught artist and accidental illustrator’. Perhaps that’s her secret. Her work speaks to everyone, unforced, and full of soul’.

Kathleen Jamie, poet.