Lark Sundsmo

Artist

Lark is a predominantly self taught artist, daughter of an immigrant from the Caribbean and a cowgirl from Montana. Her early childhood was in Washington D.C. where she was immersed into art among her friends and family in her early elementary homeschooling community in Maryland.  As her family moved around the country, Lark turned to art to bridge into new communities, winning local art competitions and publishing works in kids magazines while meeting new friends everywhere she moved. She invested hours into her sculptures in polymer clays and paper mache as well as construction paper collages, water colors, acrylics and pencil drawings. Upon moving to Arizona, she attended the Fountain Hills Art Festival where she discovered the works of Jennifer McCurdy and discovered a desire to turn clay. In high school her only option for ceramics was a sculpture class though, where she felt she found a medium she was naturally inclined to work with but figured she would probably never get the opportunity again, and replaced the space her art had taken with her education. After major car accident Lark took a semester to travel and met Tyler in Tumon, Guam, where he was stationed. A year later they welcomed their first daughter. It was during those long days with dead end jobs, long hours at school and entertaining toddlers in the little home in Washington state close to where Tyler grew up that Lark discovered she could manipulate her skills from other mediums onto Tyler’s ceramics and got more and more detailed results the more she understood about the colors and firing processes, as she tried more and more techniques. The very first project was a simple bowl with a cloud design and a cherub that bore a striking similarity to their eldest at four years old. Within the year it was the floral bowls that got them started when they were invited to the Seattle Home and Garden Show in 2012 and by the end of the following year her paintings of the vintage deep sea divers, sunken war equipment, and ocean floor with coral across Tyler’s forms were being displayed at the PNW Coos Art Museum Annual Maritime Show for their very first Juried Art Show. Today, she runs their online store while raising three growing wildlings; a teen, a tween and a not-so-little-any-more diva in training, all in her old home in Arizona along with her talented husband, gardening, cooking, writing and still manages to create some beautiful things albeit some nights after everyone normal has long gone to bed.