The popularity of art fairs has grown in the past decade. These venues bring together galleries, artists, and collectors to learn about artists from around the world and to recognize and contemplate the importance of art in society. Many fairs focus on certain themes and will often feature panels and conversations among leaders involved in all aspects of the art world.

Harmony is a state of coexistence, it is achieved when two or more entities complement each other and enhance one another’s effects. It is ubiquitous, but when things are in perfect harmony we rarely give a second thought to the disparate elements at play. The connection between art and architecture is too often forgotten, an example of a harmonious relationship.

There is something unique about Salzburg. Like many European cities, it is rich with history and alive with the hum of modern technology and life. Like so many other cities, the stones of its churches, palaces, schools and homes tell stories centuries old. Yet there is something distinct about Salzburg. It is a city of music, dance and artistic expression in immeasurable and innumerable ways.

Susan Swartz is an artist on a journey, her body of work tells a story – it quietly whispers of her innermost inspirations to those who take the time to simply be with each painting. Over the course of her career, Susan has explored realism, impressionism, expressionism and has recently arrived at a more abstract resting place, her work now leaves more open to interpretation than ever before.

Susan has long been an impassioned defender of human rights. Over the past decade, she and her husband, Jim, have helped produce important films that seek to shed light on injustice, like Born Into Brothels, which won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary and Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

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?

If you stroll into the Naples International Art & Antique Fair this weekend, guess whose painting will be the first to welcome you? Susan's of course! Autumn Blaze II, a Swartz signature piece, graces the opening of the pavilion.