A LOVE FOR ART: Sandra Lester uses her amazing talents to create vibrant, one-of-a-kind abstract art

Story By Maria Rakoczy | Photos By Joshua Berry | Living 50 Plus

Sandra Lester is our very own Van Gogh. A skilled artist, a member of the Huntsville Art League, and a Madison resident, Lester creates eye-catching and thought-provoking art that invokes the color and movement of Vincent Van Gogh’s art.

Lester’s artwork is the culmination of a life-long passion and career in art.

Raised by a single mother in Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York, she discovered her talent and passion for art at a very young age. In kindergarten, she received her first commissions.

“I remember drawing a farmer with the overalls. This was in kindergarten, and as soon as I finished drawing it, the other kids in the kindergarten class asked me to draw one for them too,” recalled Lester. “I think I had an eye on the world at an early age, a visual idea of things that are around me, and even though I came up in a very, very poor neighborhood and poor family, somehow the teacher recognized that, and I was skipped in kindergarten and went right to the first grade.”

Her mother later moved Lester and her siblings to the Bronx, where Lester attended John Philip Sousa Junior High School, which had thriving music and arts programs. There, Lester got to further experience the arts. One teacher, in particular, was especially encouraging of her artistic talents.

“She was just wonderful in terms of not only doing drawings and paintings but also encouraging sculptures. I remember these paper mâché puppets that we made, and it was just something that really interested me a lot. And I participated in plays that happened in the school for the junior high school students and we would help paint the backdrops. So, that was something that also encouraged me and inspired me,” said Lester.

Her high school years were absent of art classes, but her eye was always on pursuing it in college. Lester was determined to become the first in her family to go to college, and she devoted her high school years to earning her academic diploma.

With the academic diploma secured, she left New York for Massachusetts and earned her Bachelor’s degree in Art Education from Atlantic Union College. While at Atlantic Union College, she fell in love with art history.

“At that time, I took a variety of wonderful art courses, including art appreciation and art history, and although I enjoyed painting and drawing and sculpting, I really was fascinated with the wonderful story of art, art history. They did not offer a degree in that, but when I finished at Atlantic Union College, I applied for and got accepted at Howard University, and I got into their art history program, and there I received a Masters of Art degree in Art History,” Lester said.

Lester put her degrees in Art Education and Art History to use in a forty-year teaching career.

She was hired fresh out of AUC by the D.C. school system in 1968 as an art teacher.

“At that time, there was a real emphasis on trying to introduce the arts back into the schools. So, Washington, D.C. public schools had an art program, and I got hired into their art program in 1968,” recalled Lester.

She remained there until her son was born in 1974. Her teaching days were far from over though.

While home with her children, she operated a family daycare center out of her home for local children for ten years until 1985 when she returned to teaching art in Anne Arundel County Maryland.

She continued teaching in Anne Arundel County and then Howard County for another twenty years. She officially retired in 2005 after sustaining a school-related injury to her hand. Even so, Lester was undeterred from the teaching she so loved, and she continued to substitute teach even after retirement. Life also came full circle for her when she began caring for her grandchildren as well as the children of the original children she cared for in her home daycare two decades prior.

In 2016, Lester arrived in North Alabama. She followed her children, who had attended Oakwood College, to the area, and in turn, some of her friends followed her to North Alabama.

It’s been here, in North Alabama that she’s experienced a kind of creative renaissance, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When COVID came, it really jumpstarted me again to do some art because I was not really into a lot of art. I just was home decorating the house because I was always interested in design and decorating and whatnot, but during those two years of COVID, I really started sitting down and imagining why not use your skills?” she remembered.

She started out creating watercolor paintings.

“At first I was painting and drawing flowers and still-lifes and landscapes, things that ordinarily artists know a lot about,” Lester recounted. “But it wasn’t much of a challenge for me. The challenge was what can I do differently? And I decided to do abstracts but using lines and shapes and colors and composition and come up with some interesting compositions with lots of color and movement.”

To take on this challenge, she shifted to permanent inks, which are now her main medium of choice. The shape of the markers is easier for her to work with due to the injury in her hand, and their vibrant colors are perfect for the bright, colorful art she creates.

Using the permanent inks, she has created several series of abstract pieces. One of her first series was autobiographical with each piece depicting a building that was pivotal in her life including the hospital where she was born, her childhood home in Brooklyn, and the schools and churches she’s attended.

For her most recent series, she adopted a musical theme. After discussing the music program at Oakwood University with a friend, she was inspired to incorporate music into her art. Thus, she began a new series of abstracts on musical instruments.

“Music is a universal language, and anyone looking at any piece of artwork they’re either going to see something that they can recognize or if it’s something that they don’t recognize they can either imagine or they can find out more information about it. With my artworks, you can definitely see the different musical instruments, and I wanted to create the movement so that you’re not just seeing a stationary instrument. You’re seeing the flow of the movement and the notes,” she explained.

Lester’s art incorporates her brushes with a multitude of cultures and styles in her world travels. The art and architecture of Egypt has been some of the most striking in her travels, and their geometric style still influences her work today. She also cites Vincent Van Gogh as a major influence on her work.

“Van Gogh really inspired me in terms of freshness of color and also movement. I believe that he really inspired because in his beautiful artwork, first of all, I was interested in his life and I would always teach about Van Gogh because he was one of those artists who wanted to be something else and eventually became an artist, but his paintings always reflected a type of movement like the Starry Night, and I wanted to kind of get that flow and feeling and also the freshness of art so that it didn’t look old and stale,” she said.

Lester promotes her artwork and the entire local arts community with the Huntsville Art League.

Since 1957, HAL has promoted the creation and purchasing of original local art, a mission, of course, important to Lester. She especially encourages art consumers to purchase the original, handmade pieces rather than prints.

“A number of people to decorate their homes, sometimes, what they do is they go and they buy a print from a store and it could be a framed print, but the thing is, I want to encourage people to buy original art because I just think it’s an appreciation of that artist’s handiwork and it’s something that they can pass down to a relative or a friend,” said Lester.

HAL’s mission assists with Lester’s mission, but her initial involvement with HAL happened almost by accident after she happened to stumble upon an advertisement for the non-profit in the Huntsville Airport. She soon juried into the league and has had her artwork displayed in exhibits in their headquarters at Lowe Mill and has proceeds of her artwork support HAL’s mission.

“I was so glad that I could have a place that I could display my art and let others see and enjoy it as well and met some new friends too that were really, really nice people,” she said.

Though Lester’s role in the art world has changed over the years, one thing has remained the same throughout her teaching career and artist career. She always seeks to foster and inspire the artistic talents and creativity of every individual who encounters her personally or through her artwork:

“I believe that each of us are gifted with a skill or skills and particularly skills that bring enjoyment or relaxation, calmness, beauty, and those skills that we are inspired by, I think, that we should try to engage in them, and as we engage in them, I believe we are to inspire others.”