Elle Decor: At Home in Nature’s Beauty
Design in Salt Lake City—In two new stunning series of paintings, internationally acclaimed artist Susan Swartz brings the healing power of nature indoors.
Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said,
“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
Throughout a lauded decades-long career,Utah-based artist Susan Swartz has been a diligent student of nature. From her early work as a figurative painter to the remarkable, large-scale abstracts that have defined her oeuvre for the last several years, one element of her art has remained constant: her muse and inspiration—nature.
“I look at my art as an invitation to connect with nature and the healing it offers,” Swartz says. “Bringing nature into our daily lives, into our homes and workspaces, can be profoundly transformative.”
Two new series of Swartz’s work, currently on view at the Georges Bergès Gallery in New York City and in an installation in Italy at the Palazzo Bembo at La Biennale Di Venezie, embody that ethos. Her work “Nature’s Bouquet” offers boldly colorful and textural expressions of flower petals floating in the wind and cascading through the water. In “Sunflowers,” Swartz incorporates dried flora, herbs, seeds, grasses, and sunflowers into her canvases to create richly sculptural surfaces. In each piece, the artist offers the viewer an ethereal sense of being in nature, evoking a frisson of reconnection with the flourishing world beyond the walls.
Swartz’s work can be experienced a bit closer to home at her studio on Main Street in Park City and virtually via her website.
“I paint from a place of impassioned reverence for nature and determination to see it preserved,” she says. “Nature is what sustains us, and far too often we neglect that simple truth.”
