Following the success of Susan’s January 2010 solo exhibition at Utah’s oldest museum for the fine arts, the Springville Museum of Art, museum director, Vern Swanson, purchased one of the paintings for its permanent collection. “Amazing Grace” is a large piece—six feet by six feet—done in acrylic on linen. The painting depicts the crimson blaze of a maple forest, basking in the warm complacency of an autumn evening.

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.”