AMY AYANDA

AMY AYANDA Lester is an artist and musician based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her paintings and prints draw inspiration from the local landscape, its flora and colours. Images of proteas, fynbos and the familiar silhouette of Table Mountain recur in both her illustrative work and her more impressionistic canvas pieces. In subject, she returns often to her great grandmother’s flower farm in Constantia from which the family was forcibly removed in the1960s under the Group Areas Act.

Reflecting on her historical ties to the land, Amy explores themes of longing and belonging; her work a tender and intimate engagement with home. The places she paints are both real and imagined, a place to come back to – the body of a mother, a mountain, a field of flowers.

More recently, Amy has begun illustrating the bedtime stories she tells her four-year-old daughter, Frances. There is a princess and her parents, a king and a queen; the promise of magic and a castle in the clouds. Together, these illustrations are collected under the title Princess Buttercup and Her
Rainbow Adventures.
Amy has exhibited in three solo shows and several group exhibitions. Her most recent show, Yesterday’s Fire: A Print Retrospective, runs from Thursday 6 February to Saturday 29 February 2020, at Ogūn, 375 Albert Road, Woodstock.

AMY AYANDA is available at the following independent stores.