Increasingly, I find myself at a nexus point between the practice of art and the pursuit of optimal health. My latest work is an expression of that exploration.

This holiday season, find a unique and thoughtful gift for the art lover or “someone who has everything”. Susan Swartz Studios has curated a selection of limited edition and one-of-a-kind items to ease your holiday shopping.

Find the perfect gift below with our selection of scarves, stationery, prints, publications and hand-painted vases.

Susan Swartz Studios extends a warm invitation to celebrate freshly curated works in the Gallery for the fall and winter seasons.

The Kingdom of Bhutan is a land of startling beauty and aesthetic contrast: craggy peaks and verdant valleys, fraying rope bridges stretching across milky blue glacial rivers, terraced rice paddies and stone templates strung with faded prayer flags. Much has been made of Bhutan’s promotion of Gross National Happiness as its primary national measurement.

As the Salzburg Festival commences in earnest this week, Susan Swartz has made the trek from her studio on the sea in Martha’s Vineyard to the mountains of Austria. Traveling to Salzburg to celebrate the beginning of the Festival and the continuation of her exhibition, A Personal Path, Susan’s journey is in many ways representative of the breadth of her collection. From the waves that lap at the shores of Massachusetts to the winds that blow across the forested peaks of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, Susan is a master of depicting scenes of great beauty from both settings.

In a matter of mere weeks, the city of Salzburg will erupt with activity as the annual Salzburg Festival commences on July 18. The streets will bustle with visitors from more than 70 countries, restaurants and coffee shops will buzz with conversations in different languages, and the various venues for the Festival performances will fill to capacity.

Summer is settling upon Martha’s Vineyard like a picnic blanket atop a hill. As the sun’s rays grow stronger and friends and neighbors flock toward the shore, we are reminded of the awesome power of the sea to motivate and inspire. There is no better time than this moment to reflect upon Susan Swartz’s water paintings – the breadth and depth of which are not to be overlooked.

Harmony is a state of coexistence, it is achieved when two or more entities complement each other and enhance one another’s effects. It is ubiquitous, but when things are in perfect harmony we rarely give a second thought to the disparate elements at play. The connection between art and architecture is too often forgotten, an example of a harmonious relationship.

There is something unique about Salzburg. Like many European cities, it is rich with history and alive with the hum of modern technology and life. Like so many other cities, the stones of its churches, palaces, schools and homes tell stories centuries old. Yet there is something distinct about Salzburg. It is a city of music, dance and artistic expression in immeasurable and innumerable ways.

With daylight savings suddenly behind us, the days of growing darkness are here. The paradox of light and shadow brings necessary balance, and not only in a painting. As an artist, Susan embraces this darkness as a ballast for the brightness of spring. And, she knows that in any season, the natural world offers both beauty and terror, both life and death, both light and dark, all combined in a rich mash.

"For Susan Swartz's many fans in Park City, it has been thrilling to watch her heady ascent from local artist in the early 1990s to national and international star..." Thus begins Park City Magazine's feature of Susan in their Summer/Fall 2013 issue just out today. Written by Wendy Lavitt, "True Colors" details much of Susan's artistic journey since moving to Utah.

As a classically trained painter, Susan had certainly been exposed to the Pre-Raphaelites, but the Tate exhibition presented them in a new light, as an avant-garde movement. She was especially moved by the vivid natural imagery that appears in Pre-Raphaelite subjects, and by the art movement’s process of intensely looking at nature, which resulted in a new, distinctively modern style.

As the bright blooms of spring begin, one hue finally dominates the landscape around Susan’s studio in the Utah mountains: green. Susan is well accustomed to this annual shock of strong alpine color and has incorporated summer’s shade into many of her earlier works. Even so, a lifetime of mountain springs and ocean summers could not have prepared her for the particular and verdant hues of green that are native to Ireland.

As residents of one of the healthiest counties in the nation, it can be easy for Susan’s Park City neighbors to forget that a true health crisis — an epidemic of obesity and related diseases is rolling across the nation. But, as someone who has struggled for years with the effects of chronic illness, Susan places enormous weight and value on holistic health.

Just like Susan, Mary Oliver has dedicated most of her career to the environment. The American poet and recipient of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize turns towards nature for inspiration and describes the sense of wonder it instills in her. “When it’s over,” she says, “I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” (When Death Comes from New and Selected Poems (1992))

If the history of the Earth were laid out on a clock, we humans would not appear until a minute before midnight as the writer Carl Sagan so aptly analogized in Cosmos. Despite our brevity on this planet, the impact of humankind has been disproportionately profound.

Carl Sandburg on the transient beauty of nature.

As the heat of summer recedes into our skin and the last tomatoes wither on the vine, Susan looks forward to the approaching autumnal equinox. September 22 marks not only the first day of autumn, but also the point in the year when night and day are of equal length, the midpoint between the brightness of summer and the darkness of winter.

Whether it be from a literary or an artistic angle, both poet Henrietta Cordelia Ray and artist Susan Swartz seek to better understand natural waters by capturing their magnificence.

Susan was so moved by a sobering New York Times article, The Ecology of Disease, that she feels compelled to share it. The premise of the article is that human alterations of nature unleash infectious disease. “As someone who has long struggled with the negative impacts of environmentally-bred illnesses,” begins Susan. “I have long believed that human disease is essentially an environmental issue.”