SUSAN SWARTZ WATER STUDY 002

Water Study 002

36 x 36

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.

During the summer months, however, Susan paints in an entirely distinct landscape—the seaside of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. The work she creates here has a softness to it, an almost feminine curve not found in her mountain-inspired pieces.

In the last few years, Susan has begun pushing her expressionist style to something increasingly abstract, especially evident in her Water Study series. Like much of Susan’s work, the Water Study paintings—now numbering five—focus on the contrasts found in nature. Its hospitality and hostility are the foundation of her inquiry in Water Study 002, which is both a sweeping view and a close-up observation of the ocean’s idiosyncrasies.