Before Washington artist Shoshanna Ahart moves to Germany later this year, don't miss her last local show, "Fleeting Moments", at the Touchstone Gallery....Ahart's rich and warm pastels - whirling carousels, sunlit tables and vases - are minor epiphanies that almost always reveal life's big picture.

Just because artist Shoshanna Ahart likes painting mundane objects doesn't mean her art is boring. She actually finds vibrant life in brick walls, rooftop shadows and ordinary alleyways that show how beautiful life can be through an impressionistic lens. Take a look...at the Touchstone Gallery, 406 Seventh St. NW....

. . . Shoshanna Ahart has taken the details and stuff we take for granted and made us look at it, focus on it. . . . She is making us appreciate . . . the style with which people built things.

Architecture, the discipline of structure and design, has long been recognized as its own art form. Buildings have also been featured prominently in other works of art, most notably paintings. It is rare, however, to see portrayals of buildings with as much life and color as in the paintings of Shoshanna Ahart . . . . Her work is visually striking, but with a great deal of warmth and attention to detail . . . . Ahart often speaks of searching for "the exquisite in the ordinary," in her work. ''. . . as I paint there's a bond that connects to the buildings." With her rich, evocative paintings, Ahart allows us to share in that bond, and we are the better for it.

Shoshanna Ahart tries to capture the character and atmosphere of architectural composition. . . . her paintings convey her subjective interpretations . . . her aesthetic perception. . . . A romantic sense for life is evident in these paintings, but also the necessary distance which prevents the paintings from becoming 'nostalgia'.

Washington artist Shoshanna Ahart takes a fresh perspective on the subject matter . . . She is after "the sense of place." . . . She gets it . . the light and the heat are here . . . Ahart is only interested in partial views, something more than selected architectural details, something less than a whole building. She doesn't crowd her works. They are clean despite the rich painting, and, by contemporary standards, unusually compact.