Chicago artist Susan Kraut's work features paintings which combine and explore ideas about the genres of 'Still Life' and 'Landscape'. Susan is a widely respected artist who has taught painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 25 years, influencing a generation of young artists through her emphases on careful observation and the poetic qualities and effects of light.

Kraut recently had the opportunity to spend time painting in Bellagio, Italy, and these paintings are the result of that experience. Arrangements of small natural objects the artist found while spending time in her environment are depicted in these paintings. They are arranged in informal, yet delicate compositions, while windows into the Italian landscape serve as backdrops, and reminders of the origin of the objects. These paintings possess a meditational, poetic sensibility, and remind us of the power inherent in the quiet act of seeing.

Artist's Statement

Still life painting, as described by Norman Bryson in his book Looking at the Overlooked, "...lavishes attention on those things normally overlooked as mundane and unimportant," and has the effect for the viewer of "transfiguring the commonplace." My work of the past several years has focused on ordinary, everyday objects, casually placed on tables or windowsills, illuminated by a particular moment of daylight, often the warm intensity of late afternoon sunlight. My paintings allude to a moment of stillness and reflection, a memory of a small piece of the natural world frozen in time.

Kraut's traditional works ignore fashion

Still-life works exude pleasure and conviction

By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
March 28, 2003

Susan Kraut's new paintings at the Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery are everything that fashion says paintings should not be--and are the better for it.

For more than 25 years, the artist has painted still lifes that have admitted, then excluded, many representations of the outside world. These new oils on panel are interior views that banish even the suggestion of the gardens that Kraut once depicted.

The pieces focus on a few objects--pieces of fruit, sprigs in a clear glass vase, a ceramic pot, a circular table. Added to them is just the autumn or winter light that streams in from a nearby window plus shadowplay of varying complexity.

As in Kraut's work that was featured in a two-person exhibition from 2001, the influence of 17th Century Portuguese still lifes is felt. The whole enterprise is carried by atmosphere and paint handling. There is not even a hint of an underlying conceptual program.

The works' pleasure comes through Kraut's subtle adjustments of form and color; though never self-proclaiming, they are remarkably different from one piece to another. A golden stillness is, however, present in several of the 14 paintings.

Painting like this has been done for centuries, and Kraut seeks less to extend it than find her place along the continuum. It is art that strives to occupy the still point of the turning world and makes the attempt with utmost conviction.

At Gwenda Jay / Addington, 704 N Wells St. Hours are 11 to 6 Tuesday through Saturday; 312-664-3406