CREATIVE
COUPLE
Beau & Kara Studios to be featured in art tour, April 24-25
Art is everywhere in the home of Beau and Kara Lasiewicz.
Whether it’s the eye-catching oil paintings and plentiful photos hanging on the walls or the ornate woodworking from floor to ceiling, the couple’s many forms of self-expression are on display for all to see. Their two-story garage serves as a multi-purpose work area, with space for Beau’s woodworking projects and Kara’s pottery on the ground floor, and a painting studio on the second.
All of this has sprung up on a thirdgeneration dairy farm located northeast of Dorchester, just across the Taylor County line.
Beau & Kara Studios will be one of the stops in the upcoming Clark County “Spring into the Arts Tour” on April 24 and 25. Though they’re not located in Clark County, the couple are happy to be part of the regional tour.
Kara grew up on the farm where they built their home and art studio, while Beau was born and raised in Thorp, the son of the local plumber. They met as students at UW-Stout in Menomonie, but not in an art class like you might expect; it was while washing dishes together in the cafeteria.
It took each of them awhile to find to their preferred methods of artistic expression.
“I started in multi-media, and found out that I absolutely hated computers, and I had no patience,” Kara said.
She switched to a double major in studio art and art education, receiving both bachelor’s degrees in five years Beau started as a dietetics major, but he eventually graduated with a bachelor’s degree in technology education and then earned a master’s in curriculum. Going into education was not something he originally intended to do, however.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do because the dietetics thing wasn’t working, so I took a test, and my options were greeting card shop owner, truck driver or shop teacher,” he said. “So I decided to try shop teacher, and that worked out well, because I didn’t hate it.”
In his 13 years as a shop teacher, his goal was to instruct his students on how to make “functional art,” something he continues to do at his home studio.
Teaching young artists has long been part of the couple’s vocation. Until recently, Beau was the art teacher in Spencer, and for the last 13 years, Kara has taught in Auburndale.
The couple started their working lives in Kenosha, but Kara said she hated living in a big city and longed to get back to the rural countryside she grew up in.
When her father passed away, she wanted to keep their 300-acre farmstead in the family, but with a different purpose in mind. The age-old dairy barn, which used to house the family’s Holstein herd, was transformed into a woodshop.
“We knew we couldn’t just let it sit empty, because that’s how barns die,” she said.
It look a lot of work to make that happen, though, as the couple still remembers what it was like to remove all of the hay out of the hay mow by hand.
Remodeling the family barn was just the beginning when it came to taking on do-it-yourself projects.
“I think we’ve taken down four barns together, just the two of us — and a truck and a small tractor,” she said. “That’s where a lot of his reclaimed wood comes from, the beams and everything.”
Their woodshop now contains rows of stacked wooden beams and boards they’ve accumulated from old barns, with each stack labeled based on what farm it came from. The couple has developed a reputation as wood salvagers, so people will often call them up when they’re planning to tear down a barn.
“We always hate to see them go down; they usually bury them or burn them,” he said.
If they were to ever win the lottery, the couple says they’d love to use the money to buy up old abandoned barns and rebuild them into barn “sanctuaries” for people to tour.
“We’d adopt all the animals and fix up and adopt all the old barns,” Kara says.
Handiness is a trait that Beau learned early on as the son of a master plumber.
“I was doing plumbing jobs since I was five,” he said. “I’d always go out on plumbing jobs, and if I was too little (to do something), I’d just go out in the back of the shop and take apart furnaces and water heaters.”
Beau wasn’t interested in a career as a tradesman, but he parlayed a lot of those skills into his work as an artist.
Beau & Kara Studios focuses on four mediums: oil paintings, woodworking, pottery and event photography.
Kara’s specialities are painting and pottery, though she also helps out with the photography.
“If we ever shoot weddings, I’m always the sniper in the back and he’s upfront, walking around like he owns the place,” she says, laughing.
Beau said he always carried a camera around with him as a kid, serving as his family’s unofficial photography. It went from being a hobby to part of their business after Beau photographed Kara’s brother’s wedding in 2008.
He likes that photography is challenging, and he ended up teaching classes on the subject in both Thorp and Spencer.
Kara has been painting since high school, but she really started to take it seriously in college, when she honed in on landscapes. Five years ago, she took a portrait painting class with David Hummer at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, which inspired her to improve her skills in that format.
She’s attended a variety of intensive workshops put on by well-known artists, including Alyssa Monks, an instructor at the New York Academy of Art.
“You could put in a 40-hour week of just solid painting in three days,” she said.
Many of her portraits have been inspired by her students, who are always excited to be the subject of her paintings.
“It’s fun because they put a spunk into it that you may or may not always get it,” she said.
While most of her paintings are straightforward renderings of people and places, Kara said she’s also interested in exploring a new movement called “disrupted realism.” These types of paintings capture something recognizable, but “abstracting it to the point where it makes it almost uncomfortable or more interesting to look at,” she said.
Her skills and sensibilities as a painter informs their work as photographers, whether setting up shots of wedding ceremonies or high school seniors.
“If I were going to paint it, what would I want it to look like?” she explains.
For Kara, pottery is almost more of a relaxation technique, a respite from the more intense process of painting.
“I can start and stop and drop it easily, versus painting, where once I start, I don’t want to stop until I find a good place to stop if I have to,” she said.
Kara describes her pottery as “functional sculpture” on a miniature scale, consisting mostly of cups, plates and even a sink for one of their bathrooms.
Beau’s medium of choice, wood, is something he’s been working with since 1997, the year he started college. He took onebasicwoodworkingclassatUW-Stout, but most of his skills are self-taught.
Beau said he started off with very traditional pieces, figuring out how chairs, tables and benches fit together, but he eventually began adding a sense of tension and imbalance to make his work more unique.
“I want a piece of furniture to not look like a standard piece of furniture,” he said. “I can, it’s just more fun to screw it up.”
At the same, the wood he chooses to work with is not always what you would call conventional. In addition to salvaged barn beams, he also gets odd tree scraps from Kara’s brother, a forester who works up north. He once took a tree burl — like a wooden blister — and transformed it into a collection of pedestal tables.
When it comes to re-imagining scavenged wood, Beau said his objective is to find the beauty in something that others may consider grotesque or unsightly.
“The uglier the board, the better it makes a piece of furniture because I try to accentuate all the defects — the knotholes, the nail holes and worm holes,” he said.
When asked if they see themselves as “collaborators,” Beau says they often feed off each other’s opinions and ideas.
“I’d say we collaborate on our own independent projects,” he said.
Kara says the house they live in is “our biggest art project to date” — something they designed together and built all the interior finishings and furnishings for. It was constructed on what was once a cow lane, and still overlooks fields rented out to farmers.
Beau and Kara first joined the Clark County tour art tour as guest artists at Munson Bridge Winery, but this year, they look forward to showing people where they create their work.
Beau & Kara Studios is located at N290 CTH C, Stetsonville. For more information on the art tour, go to www.clarkcountywi.org.
WHAT THEY DO -This pair of paintings in the Lasiewiczs’ basement shows Kara doing her pottery and Beau engaged in woodworking. Beau painted the one of his wife, and Kara painted Beau.
PORTRAIT PAINTER -Pictured above are three of Kara’s portraits in progress, including two oil paintings and a drawing of her niece, Abby.
A SHAGGY TABLE -This table is a good example of Beau’s self-described “odd” looking furniture
FUNCTIONAL - This shell-shapedwork of pottery made by Kara serves as a bathroom sink for the couple.
POTTERY -A collection of Kara’s pottery is on display in their garage workshop, which has a spinning wheel andkiln for her to create her ceramics.
A FRIENDLY FACE - A painting called “Tiny Cirque” is one of many hanging on the walls of Beau and Kara Lasiewicz’s home between Dorchester and Stetsonville.
