[4] Her extended education can be attributed to both her father who instilled in her his enjoyment of books and learning[4][3] and to her mother who made artificial flowers to supplement the family's income.

[1] After encouragement from her coworker Elza Brahmin, Clark attended evening classes at the Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts from 1916 into 1918, at which time the school was closed while changes were made in the art-education program[4] after the October 1917 revolution.

[4] Unfortunately Oreste drowned in the summer of 1923 before their plans could be carried out, and Clark and her son Benedict left for the Allegri family home in Paris by themselves in the fall.

[1] She had little opportunity for her own art, while caring for her son and doing domestic work for her in-laws;[3] despite this she created Memories of Leningrad in 1923: Mother and Child in 1924,[4] and a self-portrait in 1925.

[3] In 1916, Clark discovered that the landscape painter Savely Seidenberg's studio was on the same streetcar line as the shoe factory where she worked; she began to take art night classes there.

Clark was familiar with the many prominent artists of the time, including Vladimir Tatlin, who believed that they were creating a revolutionary art – Cubism and Futurism – for the new regime.

[6] Clark was interested in colour and still life, to which Petrov-Vodkin brought his theories of space, and studied his way of depicting a visual perspective that was not an artificial architectural construction.

[6] It was from Petrov-Vodkin that Clark learned the technique of spherical perspective in which figures and objects are distorted from their perpendicular axis to produce dynamic moment.

[7] In years to come, Clark drew on her teacher's concept of tilting the usual verticals and horizontals, she employs this technique in her 1947 painting Essentials of Life.

[6] The tilt of the surfaces and the placement of the objects show she understood Picasso as she put him together with Petrov-Vodkin to turn out her own Paraskeva Clark still-lifes.

In Portrait of Philip for example, the artist creates a complex but very balanced pattern of parallel and perpendicular lines within the stable square of the canvas, containing and supporting the cool, appraising, sartorial figure of her husband.

[8] In Petroushka, Clark creates a seemingly innocent scene of street entertainers; it was painted as an outranged response to newspaper reports of the killing of five striking steelworkers by Chicago police in the summer of 1937.

[9] She chose to adapt the story of Petrushka (the Peter puppet and symbol of suffering humanity within Russian tradition) to a North American context.

A socialist, a self-identified "red Russian" communist, and one of the few artists producing political art in Canada at the time,[3] Clark at this point became active in the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy.