After a lifetime of creative pursuits, Karin Luciano opened River-Crossing Gallery in 2004, right in the heart of Margaret River.

Karin Luciano, an award-winning artist, has held 18 solo exhibitions, as many collaborative exhibitions and exhibited in the eastern states of Australia and overseas. 

After many years of travelling around the world, dozens of times in Asia and all over Australia, Melbourne born Karin Luciano finally settled in Western Australia in the eighties and then in Margaret River in 1992.

Immeasurable influences on her work include her late father, Andre Schuster a maestro gypsy violinist and double bass player from Transylvania. Also in her ancestry is the infamous feminist artist, activist and painter Portia Geach.  Portia was Luciano’s great great aunt born in the late 1800s, who donated an art prize that is awarded to Australian women portrait artists in the annual Portia Geach Portrait Prize held in Sydney.

Karin studied classical music for many years and attended the ballet regularly as a young girl.  A colourist at heart, Karin’s paintings are inspired by emotion, music and the environment she lives in. The views while she paints from her studio are of the grandeur of the Jarrah forests and the river itself. The sunsets and the white, sandy unspoilt beaches of the area also inspire her vibrant ink series.

Although Karin has only be painting for ten years, her paintings are sought by art collectors all over the world.

Her large textural canvases capture the eye with her lustrous use of metallic paint.  Movement is expressed through her free-flowing lines and her trade mark embellishments of gold and silver leaf.

“I love to use gold leaf generously as it conveys to me a feeling of well-being and abundance.  I try to apply colours like words shape poems, like notes that shape music. Art for me is intuition. My works are “emotionally based” and serve as “a mirror to the soul”.  My paintings speak a universal language based on colour and form; the power of these works rest in their spontaneity and abandon.

Yet though Luciano’s artworks inspire emotion to the viewer, they are also an example of careful placement of colour value and possess an air of excitement.

Karin Luciano’s paintings are in collections worldwide and as a prolific painter she is known locally as “The Picasso of Margaret River!”