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.

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.”

May is National Lyme Disease Awareness Month, and June is often the month when infected ticks are most prevalent in much of the United States. This past May offered Susan an opportunity to reflect on a very important film for which she her husband, Jim, served as executive producers over four years ago.

Under Our Skin premiered in May 2008 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, was shortlisted for an Academy Award, and has racked up over 90,000 ratings on Netflix to date. A few weeks ago, Dr. Phil even devoted an entire program to chronic Lyme (video below), using several minutes of footage from Under Our Skin.

In the early 1970's, a mysterious illness was discovered among children living around the town of Lyme, CT. What was first diagnosed as isolated cases of juvenile arthritis, eventually became known as Lyme disease, one of the most misunderstood and controversial illnesses of our time.

To learn more about mercury contamination, Susan highly recommends Diagnosis, Mercury: Money, Politics & Poison, by physician Jane M. Hightower. In the book, Dr. Hightower retraces her investigation into the modern prevalence of mercury poisoning, revealing how political calculations, dubious studies, and industry lobbyists endanger our health. While mercury is a naturally occurring element, she learns there’s much that is unnatural about this poison’s prevalence in our seafood. Dr. Hightower’s tenacious inquiry sheds light on a system in which, too often, money trumps good science and responsible government. Susan suggests that Diagnosis: Mercury should be required reading for everyone who cares about their health.

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.”