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.

The life and work of Susan Swartz, featured in the November 2012 edition of The American.

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.

Susan’s solo exhibition, BREATH OF NATURE, has just opened at London’s Belgravia Gallery. The paintings included in the show mark a turning point in Susan’s artistic vision towards an increasingly abstract—and increasingly urgent yet hopeful — painting style. Perhaps no painting illustrates this change more clearly than the title work Breathless.