June 22nd is officially the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere, a time when Susan travels down from her winter studio — perched at 8,500 feet elevation in Utah’s mountains — to her sea level summer studio off the coast of New England. Auspiciously, Susan's summer in Martha's Vineyard begins this year with a match race. The most exciting part of the race? Susan's husband, a seasoned competitive sailor, will be at the helm of his TP52 racing yacht, Vesper.

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.

Yes, it really is an English year for Susan! In choosing the recent paintings for their Susan Swartz November exhibition, Belgravia Gallery loves Transition 17 60 x 60. It's still spring in the mountains, and this painting reminds Susan of the beautiful poem from 1967 by the great English poet Philip Larkin.

It’s the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Year and Susan is celebrating in her own special sort of painterly way…with her London exhibition at Belgravia Gallery in November!

Before settling into her summer painting season in Martha's Vineyard, Susan traveled to the Amazon this spring. The Amazon Basin is a place palpably alive, and Susan could not just see and hear, but also feel the air pulsing with vitality there. During her travels, painterly images kept coming into her mind—bright colors and rich brushstrokes. Many years ago Susan was introduced to the work of another woman painter who she very much admires, British painter named Margaret Mee. Mee spent quite a bit of time painting in the Amazon in the middle part of the 20th century. “I see a lot of parallels between Margaret’s life and my own,” explains Susan. “Like me, she was an environmental activist and was plagued by environmental health problems. Also like me, she was a fiercely determined woman who painted her entire life.”

While in Washington DC last month, Susan was delighted to visit the once-in-lifetime exhibition Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716-1800.) Celebrating the centennial of Japan’s gift of cherry trees to the nation’s capital, this exhibition featured one of Japan’s most renowned cultural treasures, the extraordinary set of 30 paintings on silk scrolls by Itō Jakuchū. Painted between 1757 and 1766 and donated by the painter to the Zen monastery Shōkokuji in Kyoto, the scrolls entered the Imperial Household in the 1889 where they were displayed in part on special Imperial occasions.

Although it is an early spring in most of the country this year, it is still winter in the mountains of Utah. Inspired by a late January trip to the English countryside, Susan has just completed a series of paintings entitled Winter Hush.

Susan has been working proactively on her health with Dr. Mark Hyman, a renowned physician and educator, who practices Functional Medicine, a whole-systems approach to health. In addition to Dr. Hyman’s earlier book, UltraPrevention, also a New York Times bestseller, Susan recommends The UltraMind™ Solution.

The Seasons of the Soul exhibition has finally wrapped up at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. While Susan’s paintings coming down from the museum walls, the leaves are coming down from the aspens and Gambel oak trees surrounding Susan’s studio in Park City.

The current issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin features a long article by William A. Graham, Dean at HDS and respected Harvard professor and scholar. In “Reading the ‘Book of Nature’,” Graham uses the collection of paintings in Susan’s book, Natural Revelations, to explore the “venerable tradition of artists who find in nature their prime window on the divine.”

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.

Autumn may be Susan’s favorite season to paint in the mountains. The bright, brisk mornings and warm Indian Summer afternoons just beg for walks through the forest—walks that in Susan’s case, provide gratitude for Nature’s divine beauty and inspire a thousand new brush strokes with each step. The rust-colored maple leaves that carpet the trails and the shock of golden aspens against the hillside will surely find their way onto Susan’s canvas. Be sure to get outside and let the beauty of the season inspire your own creativity!

Where has the summer gone? In Susan’s case, it went directly onto her canvases in the form of new paintings.

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.”