Writer Sallie Brady included Susan Swartz BREATH OF NATURE show at Belgravia gallery in her PEAK FOLIAGE art world news article in November issue of ART & ANTIQUES – one of only two London exhibitions mentioned!

Susan Swartz is honored to be featured in the November 2012 edition of The Mayfair Resident!

After months of planning and preparations, Susan’s latest exhibition, BREATH OF NATURE, opens this week at London’s Belgravia Gallery. Last night, kicking off a week of exhibition events, renowned British writer Gillian Tett hosted the opening celebration. Tett has won numerous awards for her impactful journalism at the Financial Times, and Susan is proud to call her a longtime friend.

Enjoy a coffee and conversation with Susan Swartz at her exhibition, BREATH OF NATURE. Swartz is an American landscape artist and environmental campaigner whose work probes the intersection between devout spirituality and a reverance for nature. Her art is part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Swartz is also an impassioned environmental activist and educator who has worked with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jane Goodall in their efforts to shed light on environmental issues.

So begins The Field Magazine feature on Susan’s Belgravia exhibition, Brush Off. Read it now! And visit Belgravia Gallery on Albemarle Street in London W1 to see the beauty… and perhaps the darkness? You decide!

I have long been fascinated by the powerful connection between art and the environment — both define us as a people. Standing in a riverbed deep within the walls of a canyon or at the helm of a boat contemplating the vastness of our oceans, I try to imagine how an artist chooses color and finds form, and I am humbled. The outer world of nature and the interpretive world of art both insist that we transcend our narrow self-interest and see beyond what is right in front of us. Artists seek universal truths and help us form a community that responds to these truths and not to rhetoric or partisanship. The natural world reminds us how we are all connected, not by geography, but by river tributaries and wind patterns and fault lines. We depend on each other and also depend on the stewardship of the natural world. For it provides our lifeblood: clean air and water.

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))

Susan Swartz is a talented American painter of nature. What, I ask challengingly, is left to say about landscape in the 21st century? Landscape is not dead as an art subject in 2012. But it is surely close to exhausted. Mere imitation of nature went over to the camera around 1860. Paint has continued to imagine, fantasise and brilliantly lie--but landscape? The sublime, the picturesque, Impressionism, Expressionism, Romanticism, flattened perspectives, three dimensions, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Kandinsky, Richter, Hockney and Glenn Brown, it has all been done — hasn’t it?

“A Shared Passion for Environmental Campaigning” brings Artist Susan Swartz and environmental leaders Louie Psihoyos and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. together at Belgravia Gallery in London November 7th.

BREATH OF NATURE show of paintings by American Painter and Environmental Campaigner Susan Swartz on view at Belgravia Gallery October 22 - November 24

American artist Susan Swartz is being shown for the first time in London with a special exhibition of BREATH OF NATURE paintings. Susan has been recognized for being both a passionate abstract painter and ardent Environmental Campaigner. Named as an official Environmental Artist of the Salt Lake City Olympics, Susan Swartz was challenged over a ten year period with two environmentally-bred illnesses - Mercury Poison and Lyme Disease which left her at times unable to hold a paint brush. She has since changed her life and focus and her paintings have become more bold and impasssioned as she has come to support individuals and organizations who champion the protection of our environment. On November 7th, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, and Louie Psihoyos, the Academy Award winning documentary film director who is Executive Dierctor of the Oceanic Preservation Society will join Susan at The Belgravia Gallery to talk about "A Shared Passion For Environmental Campaigning."