Kari Laine McCluskey
4723 Oakwood Park Drive
Janesville, Wisconsin 53545
608-754-2885
Kari was born about the time the antiquarian avant-garde began in the 1970’s. She began winning art contests by the age of six and had inherited a love for art and found serenity in her meticulously detailed drawings while struggling with all other subjects and eventually found she had dyslexia like so many other artists. So upon graduation from high school, she pursued a modeling career and worked in Paris and found herself in the places and streets of the artists she admired the most.
She had been accepted at the School of the Art Institute upon her high school graduation and had taken a one year extension to accept the Paris modeling assignment. After being so inspired with the Impressionistic Parisian artists, she enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute. She preferred working with her hands and started developing her own black and white photographs and hand painting them in oil rather than using colored film. She liked the impact of adding and mixing her oils for her own colors. She wasn’t content with the contemporary black and white photograph and she still sought ways to give her images more layers. She continued her education and graduated from New York University with a Masters of Art.
Wanting her work to have more impressionistic qualities, she happened upon the wet-plate collodion process. This allowed her to add more texture and layering to the contemporary prints in addition to the toning and hand painting. The collodion negative gave the depth that contemporary film can never achieve. With her 8x10 view camera and vintage lenses, she finds the extraordinary in the ordinary in her own backyard as she looks through her 8x10 view camera seeing everything upside down and backwards.
She finds herself immersed in this technique and unlike the photographers of old that may have used donkeys to get to their sites, she has converted her John Deere gator to a mobile collodion darkroom and just has to stay on the path.  |
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