Who Did This
An Unauthorized Account of Lauren Hofmann Larkin
Lauren with her Willie Nelson portrait — flower crown, palette, and zero chill · Photo: Christopher Paul Cordoza
Lauren Hofmann Larkin is an artist, graphic designer, and chronically online creative based in San Marcos, Texas, where she lives with her husband, two children, and an undisclosed number of cats. She has been making art since before she could reasonably be expected to do anything well, which is to say: a very long time.
She works in watercolor, colored pencil, oil pastels, and occasionally pure stubbornness.
White Sands, New Mexico — the artist and her people
In 2002, Lauren began formal studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She then transferred to Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Germany — yes, that Bauhaus — where she proceeded to, entirely casually, have a piece of her work acquired and archived alongside Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
She does not lead with this at parties. She is telling you now only under mild duress.
The work in question was a conceptual piece for a class on Bewegung (movement), in which she digitally moved her entire apartment — Brahmsstrasse 9, to be precise — because when you attend the Bauhaus and the theme is "movement," apparently the correct response is to levitate your own home. The jury agreed.
The jury purchased it. It lives in the archive now. Next to Kandinsky. No big deal.
Weimar, Germany, 2003 — Goethe's garden house visible behind her, "floating on a feather of fate" — letting life take her however, whenever.
In 2007, Lauren was selected — by actual humans with actual taste — to represent Bauhaus-Universität at the national student exhibition Kunststudentinnen und Kunststudenten stellen aus in Bonn. National. Exhibition.
She will now return to not mentioning this.
Lauren with her piece at the national student exhibition in Bonn, 2007 — "Bauhaus Soda Can".
The collectors who took one of her screen print panels home to Germany — proof that good art finds its people
While abroad, Lauren also completed a guitar series — vivid, layered, completely her — The whole series found a permanent home with Harald Schmidt, who at the time served as the keeper of Friedrich Nietzsche's archived works in Weimar. She gave it to him. He kept it. Neither of them is making a big deal of it. I hear it's since been split up between family members and still floating around the EU.
One artist's work given to the guardian of a philosopher's legacy. Just a casual Tuesday in Weimar.
Herr Schmidt's home in Weimar — Lauren's guitar series on the walls, right where they belong
The guitar series: "Guitarts" — and the artist who made it, acting like there's no A/C (there wasn't)
Lauren eventually came home to Texas, completed a BA in Psychology and Art at Texas State University in 2015, and spent the better part of the following decade raising two small humans, navigating life with chronic illness, taking on commissions, and running an art supply operation out of her family's business — Hofmann's Supply, founded by her grandfather Fred W. Hofmann in 1937.
Legacy, it turns out, is not just a name she picked because it sounded good.
In her element — Hofmann's Supply, surrounded by every color imaginable
Her paintings are philosophical without being pretentious, personal without being navel-gazey, and colorful in a way that suggests she has Opinions about pigment. She has a signature periwinkle shimmer she mixes herself, which shows up in the reflective elements of her work like a calling card from someone too subtle to sign their name twice.
"A Sea to Surrender...A Dream to Remember" — 2024
Notable works include Swiftly Fleeing and A Sea to Surrender… A Dream to Remember. Her current project, A Brush with Eternity, uses art as a bridge between grief and something gentler — intuitive, quiet work for people who have lost someone and need a language that words can't quite reach.
"Swiftly Fleeing" — 2022
She also designed one of ten public mermaids placed around San Marcos as part of the city's public art installation — because apparently leaving art across two continents is just something she does.
Weimar got the archive piece. San Marcos got a mermaid. Both are better for it.
The San Marcos mermaid — newspaper print body, rainbow hair, roses for days. She lives in the city now. Rent free.
Pricing reflects the care, technical experience, and framing that goes into each piece — some works are more conceptual, others more technically demanding. All prices are a starting point, and Lauren is genuinely open to conversation.
She is not, however, open to "can you do it for exposure." The Bauhaus archive does not accept exposure.
The day ART SUPPLIES went up on the sign — a historic moment, wind and all
Est. 1937 · San Marcos, Texas
Legacy Arts is a Hofmann's Family Company — the continuation of something your grandfather started, run by someone who vectorizes things glitter by glitter and considers that a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Sunday.