During several long stays in Japan (her husband, Kenneth Kraft, is a scholar of Buddhism), Kraft built on her training in Western figurative art, studying sumi-e, the art of Japanese brush and ink painting. While there she began a series of fans, freely painted but constructed by traditional craftsmen, in a striking synthesis of two cultures. But it was the decorative borders found in Japanese prints, fabric, and architecture that affected her the most. Those borders stayed with her: in the checkerboard pattern undulating through the painting Phosphorescence, border has engulfed the center, suggesting the pattern-distending folds of antique cloth. These latest works are most frankly and deeply flavored by Kraft's experience of the Southwest and Mexico: from childhood stays in the art community of Taos and family trips to Oaxaca, to several long artist's residencies in the desert landscape of Arizona's Rancho Linda Vista. The spiky flowering forms pushing up from the lower sections of several of these paintings recall the yucca (as well as the Buddhist lotus), and their colors—brick red, sky blue and earth yellow—flaunt the saturated intensity of the Southwestern landscape.

Like such Pattern and Decoration artists as Miriam Schapiro and Robert Zakanitch, Kraft embraces the associations of her strong patterning with such traditional women's arts as embroidery and weaving. Her technique, too, suggests a kind of over-and-under "weaving" of the painting's surface. In her artist's statement, Ms. Kraft describes how her art is developed:

"The technique used for all of the pieces in this exhibition is a combination of watercolor, sumi ink, gouache, and frisket (a masking medium). Usually I begin with watercolor, freely painted. I then create a second dimension of pattern by masking the surface with frisket. Additional structure emerges through the application of sumi ink. Finally, I use gouache to augment and adorn until I have achieved the desired effect."

"My paintings begin with a visual idea or feeling. I find that the first versions of a particular idea generate their own variations organically, so one piece builds upon another. I regard my paintings as a physical expression of the underlying interconnectedness of all things. Sometimes I feel as if I am making visible the hidden structures that lie just beyond ordinary perception."