Lara, a Southern California native and artist, has been creating art ever since she first picked up a crayon.…to write meticulous O’s and H’s on the fireplace bricks. Her degree in English and writing, plus her background in music and theater, make storytelling an integral part of how she expresses herself.
Through her art Lara strives to teach herself to paint the beautiful stories that she sees in the natural world around her. Everything she paints has a story, as she attempts to convey a captured, crystalized moment snatched out of a dynamic timeline—a bird caught preening his feathers, or an octopus caught mid-escape. Lara says “We’re just spectators of that moment as they go about their own lives.”
Commissioned pieces are a unique opportunity to tell the intimate stories of the people who will own them. Lara began her art career by painting on three-dimensional surfaces (and still does frequently), like boxes and stools and chairs, and learned to find ways to play with the shape of the piece and let it help tell the story. This means Lara is rarely content with two dimensions, so often it still stretches into the third dimension, through the use of layered resin to emulate water currents, or clay to build up the fin on a koi’s back. Lara’s most recent passion is to take old, worn-out musical instruments, and reimagine them with clay and paint into entirely new creations. Who knew there was a peacock lurking in the secret heart of a sparkly blue violin??
Lara has sold art and won awards at galleries and festivals throughout Orange County over the last two decades, such as Laguna Art A Fair, the Orange County Fair, The Balboa Historical Art Museum, and Huntington Beach Art Center, as well as a series of special commissions awarded to million-dollar donors of Whittier College.
