Several years ago, while waiting for the paint to dry on her impressionist work, Susan began experimenting with the abstract. In the time since, when Susan stands in front of a new canvas with a brush in hand, what has increasingly emerged are true abstracts, bold and full of impact. One of her recent works, the 24×30 Trees of Gold, is being featured in ABSTRACT an exhibition at London’s revered Belgravia Gallery.

Susan is an artist who not only sees, but also relishes the contrasts of nature. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in her inspiration itself. For large portions of the year, she paints from her mountaintop studio in Utah, surrounded by the repetitive linear forms of bare aspen trunks and the craggy peaks of the high desert. There’s a sharpness to Susan’s pieces created in the West.

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.

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))

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.

Yes, it really is an English year for Susan! In choosing the recent paintings for their Susan Swartz November exhibition, Belgravia Gallery loves Transition 17 60 x 60. It's still spring in the mountains, and this painting reminds Susan of the beautiful poem from 1967 by the great English poet Philip Larkin.

Before settling into her summer painting season in Martha's Vineyard, Susan traveled to the Amazon this spring. The Amazon Basin is a place palpably alive, and Susan could not just see and hear, but also feel the air pulsing with vitality there. During her travels, painterly images kept coming into her mind—bright colors and rich brushstrokes. Many years ago Susan was introduced to the work of another woman painter who she very much admires, British painter named Margaret Mee. Mee spent quite a bit of time painting in the Amazon in the middle part of the 20th century. “I see a lot of parallels between Margaret’s life and my own,” explains Susan. “Like me, she was an environmental activist and was plagued by environmental health problems. Also like me, she was a fiercely determined woman who painted her entire life.”

Although it is an early spring in most of the country this year, it is still winter in the mountains of Utah. Inspired by a late January trip to the English countryside, Susan has just completed a series of paintings entitled Winter Hush.

Here’s an opportunity to own Endless Glow II, a Susan Swartz Original Acrylic on Linen painting, while supporting Waterkeeper Alliance, the world’s largest and fastest growing clean water advocacy group. Susan, a longtime proponent of eliminating toxins from our rivers and oceans, is proud to join this amazing group of artists and activists in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.

Susan has been painting furiously in preparation for her December 8-11 exhibition at The Carlyle Hotel in New York City, as well as the Art Palm Beach show in early 2012. At the same time Susan’s creating her well-known landscapes, she’s been quietly working away on a separate body of work.

The Seasons of the Soul exhibition has finally wrapped up at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. While Susan’s paintings coming down from the museum walls, the leaves are coming down from the aspens and Gambel oak trees surrounding Susan’s studio in Park City.

The current issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin features a long article by William A. Graham, Dean at HDS and respected Harvard professor and scholar. In “Reading the ‘Book of Nature’,” Graham uses the collection of paintings in Susan’s book, Natural Revelations, to explore the “venerable tradition of artists who find in nature their prime window on the divine.”

Autumn may be Susan’s favorite season to paint in the mountains. The bright, brisk mornings and warm Indian Summer afternoons just beg for walks through the forest—walks that in Susan’s case, provide gratitude for Nature’s divine beauty and inspire a thousand new brush strokes with each step. The rust-colored maple leaves that carpet the trails and the shock of golden aspens against the hillside will surely find their way onto Susan’s canvas. Be sure to get outside and let the beauty of the season inspire your own creativity!

Where has the summer gone? In Susan’s case, it went directly onto her canvases in the form of new paintings.

Susan recently completed an original commission for the new Zion’s Bank Financial Center in Provo, Utah. A longtime supporter of Susan’s work, Zion’s Bank dedicated the new eight-story building in May 2010, at which point the painting was revealed to the public.

Susan Swartz creates vibrant landscape paintings from her studio in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. An official artist of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, she is well known to public and private collectors alike, and just wrapped a solo exhibition at the Springville Museum of Fine Arts in Utah. There is an underlying energy and tension to Susan’s work that hints of her complex relationship with the natural environment. “Mankind’s carelessness with the natural world has had a very personal effect on me,” she explains. “Twice I have struggled environmentally caused illnesses.”