McKINNEY, TEXAS - -  The two painters in this show are interested in looking at the natural world through the medium of paint; they attempt to capture the illusiveness of the shifting light and atmosphere that define what we see around us. 

While photographic media can capture an instantaneous image, the act of painting these phenomena does something different: it distills our visual experience, condensing and summarizing what is actually a succession of experiences over time, encompassing them in a single, dense representation. 

Both artists work in slow, layered applications of paint, attempting to convey a sense of stillness and silence, of a moment carefully ordered and frozen in time, taken out of the swiftness and chaos of passing life.

Richard Deutsch's paintings represent his engagement with a solitary subject and its reflection, their forms becoming dispersed into flickering marks of light and color. 

This body of work is part of a long series of paintings of  wooden pilings as observed in the Chicago River in the shadow of downtown high rises; structures that the artist is drawn to both as symbols of austerity, endurance and monumentality as well as to their potential as metaphors for decline and ruin. 

Susan Kraut is interested in the natural light of a specific place and time, as it enters an interior and illuminates the objects inside.  This series of paintings comes out of a month-long experience working in the Lake Como region of Northern Italy during the fall season. 

The fruits, leaves and berries growing there, collected from walks through the landscape, become the paintings' subjects, arranged casually on windowsills, defined by the particular light of that place and time. 

Both artists are residents of Chicago and have taught for many years in the Drawing and Painting department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Richard Deutsch has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both in Chicago and nationally. He has been a visiting artist at many institutions and will be teaching painting at the Burren College of Art in Western Ireland this summer.  

Susan Kraut has had shows recently in Aberdeen, Scotland and Oxford, England, as well as a group show at the Prince Street Gallery in New York.  She is scheduled to have a one-person show in May at the Addington Gallery, Chicago. 

Richard Deutsch and Susan Kraut present their latest original art in Texas in the exhibit "Light, Reflection, Subject."  This museum quality show opens with an artist's reception on Saturday, March 13 7-10pm at Laura Moore Fine Art Studios, 107 S. Tennessee in historic downtown McKinney.  The exhibit will be on display through April 7.  Gallery is open Mon-Sat 1-5pm or by appointment.

For additional information and/or press photographs please contact Laura Moore at by email or call 214.914.3630.  Learn more about our gallery at www.lauramooreart.com.