Ariana Papademetropoulos in her studio in Los Angeles, California, 2024.
In the summer of 2024, Raphaël Stein, Creative Director at the David Lynch Foundation, visited the painter Ariana Papademetropoulos in her studio in Los Angeles, California. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Raphaël Stein: When and where did you first learn about Transcendental Meditation?
Ariana Papademetropoulos: I found out about Transcendental Meditation through a friend. I was going to CalArts, and I must have been around twenty years old. My friend asked me if I wanted to do TM, and I had tried different meditations practices, and I found them all quite difficult because my brain would just take over all of my thoughts. And then she told me that it was David Lynch’s foundation. And I think because I was such a fan of his, it felt like a gateway as he didn’t seem like the type of person to be very new age, and I liked that about his interest in Transcendental Meditation.