Amanda Bouquet was born in 1969 in Highland Park, Illinois. Splitting her childhood between New York City, the wild beauty of the Arizona desert, and suburban Illinois, she studied art history at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and NYU. She worked at Michael Walls Gallery in Soho then moved to Prague in 1991, where she started two vegetarian restaurants, threw costume parties, and DJ’ed. Returning to New York, she settled in the Village to raise her family.
Amanda began painting in the late ’90s and has studied at SVA and New York Academy of Art. With a focus on human and animal portraiture, she combines realism with a deliberate flattening of pattern and color - a technique geared toward capturing her sitter’s innate qualities by using textiles and saturation to assist in their representation. In addition to portraiture, Amanda loves subverting the traditional still life by featuring everyday objects that burst with a life of their own. She is currently working on a series based on the florals of Rachel Ruysch.