In the Studio

THE PAINTING PROCESS Lark's studio in the old ART 2 art District Building on Mid-Wilshire Blvd is less a workspace and more a living organism — layered, unpredictable, alive. Walk in and you'll find canvases in every state of becoming, surfaces propped against walls and laid flat on the floor, surrounded by an arsenal of mark-making tools that most artists would never dream of reaching for. Because Lark doesn't paint. She converses. While the brush is always present, it is only the beginning of the story. Sponges pull color across the surface in wide, breathing sweeps. Found objects — cardboard edges, wooden blocks, torn boxes, fabric scraps, anything with a texture worth saying something — are pressed, dragged, and layered into the work. Where other artists stop at the easel, Lark continues: onto wood panels where paint sinks and settles differently, into the grain, into the quiet. Onto glass, where light itself becomes a collaborator, shifting the mood of a piece with every hour of the day. Her collages are perhaps the most intimate window into her process — assemblages of found materials, torn paper, color fragments, and organic matter that carry the feeling of something remembered rather than composed. Nothing is off-limits. The question she asks of every material is simply: does it have something to say? Underlying all of this is a practice of meditation and intuition that predates any single technique. Before the first mark, there is stillness. The work emerges not from a plan but from a state of listening — to the material, to the space, to whatever memory or sensation the day has brought in from the world outside. The result is art that feels less like an object and more like an experience: gestural, vibrant, rooted in something ancient and alive.