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ARTIST STATEMENT
My recent paintings are drawn from my experience at a residency in Northern Italy, where, even in late fall, the grounds were filled with brightly colored fruits and berries still growing on trees: pomegranates, persimmons, pears, oranges, strange vines and leaves. Placing these objects on the wide, white windowsills of my residence, I looked out onto misty gray mountains and green/blue banks of fog setting in and lifting off the distant hills. Against this outside atmosphere, the objects took on for me a sense of nostalgia and melancholy of the changing season, a reminder of the fragility of living things and the passing of time. Sometimes I felt that the still life objects, the fruits and berries and branches that I had brought inside, were on the windowsill longing to be back outside. Often, the casual and random ways in which they were left on the sill seemed to echo the formations of the hills or clouds behind them. They looked to me like still life pretending to be landscapes.
In my first series of paintings that resulted from that stay in Italy, I seemed to want to capture more accurately, more descriptively, what I experienced there: the landscapes that were directly out my windows, the objects just as they looked when I collected them and placed them on the windowsills.
As I have continued into this second series of works, the paintings seem to be shifting more towards my memory of the experience. I have taken more liberties with the subjects; I have felt less tied to the actual scenes that were in front of me; I am more interested in the way the events become combined in my memory of the experience, such as the way a particular cloud shape evokes the shape of a crinkled leaf. I have begun combining elements of the place that I didn’t actually see together, elements that evoke the mood that I experienced.
I have gradually become more fascinated with painting the fleeting, non-material elements of the place: the light, the atmosphere, the clouds, and the way these contrast with the tactile specificity of the objects – the fruits, leaves and berries with their particular shapes, colors, textures. They represent two opposite qualities of the world we experience – the non-tangible, larger-than-human elements which surround us on the earth, and the mundane, human-scaled objects that nature gives us. This contrast has led me to pay more attention to recording the fragility and impending decay of the once-perfect fruits – the rotten spots that have begun appearing on the pears, the berries beginning to shrivel, the leaves starting to wither. This is, of course, a traditional subject of still life painting, vanitas: a reminder that nothing in life will last.
Biography
Susan Kraut
Born in Washington, D.C.
B.A. The University of Michigan
M.Ed. Rutgers University
Studied at the New School for Social Research, N.Y.C.
B.F.A. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Studied etching and painting at Morley College, London, England
M.F.A. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
SELECTED INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS
2005 Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago
2004 Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy
2004 Public Art Commission, Evanston Cultural Arts Award, Century Garage, Evanston
2003 Gwenda Jay /Addington Gallery, Chicago
2001 “Places and Things,” Three Arts Club Gallery, Chicago
2000 Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois
1998 Riverside Art Center, Riverside, Illinois
1998 Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, Illinois
1997 Gwenda Jay Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
1995 “Stillness and Light,” Evanston Art Center, Evanston, Illinois
1993 Deson-Saunders Gallery, Chicago
1993 University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, Art Gallery, LaCrosse, Wisconsin
1992 Judith Racht Gallery, Harbert, Michigan
1990 University Club of Chicago Gallery, Chicago
1989 University of Minnesota Fine Arts Gallery, Morris, Minn.
1988 Deson Saunders Gallery, Chicago
1987 Ann Brierly Memorial Gallery, Winnetka, Illinois
1986 Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago
1983 Countryside Art Center, Arlington Heights, Illinois
1982 Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago
1981 Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C.
1979 Cudahy Library, Loyola University of Chicago
1978 Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago
1976 N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2007 “Between the Lines,” Water St. Gallery, Douglas, MI
2006 Faculty Sabbatical Exhibit, Betty Rymer Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2005 “ Horizon”, Las Manos Gallery, Chicago
2004 “Le Cadavre Exquis”, Art Institute of Portland, Portland, Oregon
2002-03 “Contemporary Realities,” Raclin School of the Arts Gallery, Indiana University, South Bend, Indiana
2002 “Art and Nature,” Suburban Fine Arts Center, Highland Park, Illinois
2000-01 “The Object Considered: Contemporary Still Life,” Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, and traveling
2001 Opening Night Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2000 Twenty-Fourth Annual Invitational Drawing Exhibition, Emporia State
University, Emporia, Kansas
1999-00 “Contemporary American Realist Drawings from the Davidson Collection,” Art Institute of Chicago
1996-99 “Objects of Personal Significance,” Exhibits, USA, traveling national show
1998 “Painting,” Shain Fine Arts, Charlotte, North Carolina
1996 “All About Paintings,” Judith Racht Gallery, Harbert, Michigan
1995 “Three Phases of Nature,” Fine Arts Building Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
“Art of the Prairie,” Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois
1994 "The Illinois Landscape: Selected Views," College of Lake County Gallery, Grayslake, Illinois
1993 "Pacific," Deson-Saunders Gallery, Chicago
1992 "From America's Studio: Drawing New Conclusions," Betty Rymer Gallery,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
1991 "Objects Observed," Cortesi Gallery, Highland Park, Illinois
"Landscape in Art: New Traditions and Extended Meanings," Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, Illinois
"Small Things," Northern Illinois University Gallery, Chicago
1990 Eleven Chicago Artists at Zephyr Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky
"On Nature," Deson Saunders Gallery, Chicago
Central Washington University International Drawing Show, Ellensberg, WA
1989 "Still Life," Olive Tree Gallery, Daley College, Chicago
Chicago Women Painters, R.H. Love Gallery, Chicago
1988 "New Realism in Chicago," St. Louis Gallery of Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO
"Flora '88," Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois
1987 Northwest Indiana University Gallery, Gary, Indiana
"Nine on Nature," Beacon Street Gallery, Chicago
1986 San Francisco Airport Show, San Francisco, California
Fermi Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois
1985 Kienholz Chicago Art Show, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
"Midwest Realist Show," Payne Art Center, Oshkosh, WI
1984 New Horizons Show, Cultural Arts Center, Chicago
1982 "Interiors," Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago
1981 Contemporary Prints and Drawings, Art Institute of Chicago
1980 "Aspects of Realism," N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago
Illinois Invitational Exhibit, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Illinois
Prize Winners Revisited, Chicago & Vicinity Show, Art Institute of Chicago
American Women Artists, Museu Arte Contemporania, Sao Paulo Brazil
1979 Critic's Choice, Gallery Northwest, Indiana University,
1978 "Works on Paper," Chicago & Vicinity Show, Art Institute of Chicago
"New Horizons in Art," Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago
1974 Chicago & Vicinity Show, Art Institute of Chicago
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
2007 Artist Interview, Amy Rudberg, author, Chicago Artists’ Coalition newsletter
2005 March, November Review, A. Artner, Chicago Tribune
2004 Included in: A Guide to Drawing, 6th Edition, Mendelowitz, Wakeham, and Faber, Wadsworth/Thomson
2003 Review, A. Artner, Chicago Tribune
2001 Review, A. Artner, Chicago Tribune
2000 Catalogue, “The Object Considered: Contemporary Still Life in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana,” Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, Ohio
2000 Catalogue, Twenty-Fourth Annual National Drawing Exhibition, Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas
1999 Contemporary American Realist Drawings: The Jalane and Richard Davidson Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, by R. Fine, R. Hernandez-Duran, and M. Pascale
1997 Objects of Personal Significance, catalogue, by Janet Marquardt-Cherry, Exhibits, USA
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