they usually bury them or ….
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.
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.
