A Personal Path – Susan Swartz
Landscape and Journey
By Der Salon
American painter Susan Swartz is presenting a selection of her works for the first time in Austria at the Kollegienkirche Salzburg. From May 30 to July 4, 2014 the Salzburg Foundation and the Foundation for Art and Culture Bonn is putting on an exhibition of the renowned artist’s works in the heart of Salzburg’s old town in cooperation with the Catholic University Parish/Unipfarre. Susan Swartz is dedicated to painting abstract, extremely colorful landscapes, and her acrylic works have a strong connection to nature, but also demonstrate a meditative, spiritual character. The artist’s creative spirit is inspired by nature, by the beauty of the immediate surroundings of her two residences in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, which is located on the sea, and in the impressive Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Her deep belief in God, the creator of the universe, of nature and man, strengthens her work as an artist. “My attraction to abstract painting was inspired both by the world around me and the importance of my environment and my relationship to God,” she says. Swartz’s connection to nature was challenged for some time as she struggled with mercury poisoning and Lyme disease. The fact that the root of both of her ailments lay in environmental damage caused by humans only strengthened her desire to move other people to be more careful and protect God’s gift more consciously. Her decades-long struggle against the sicknesses has changed her as an artist and an activist. She takes active part in environmental campaigns against water and air pollution. She also supports the vision and production of documentary films by Impact Partners, a film promotion society, of which she is a founding member. Impact Partners aims to reveal social inequalities and ecological injustices; one of their films won an Oscar as the best documentary. Susan Swartz is an artist on a journey and her works tell a story – those who spend time on each individual work are exposed to the most intimate inspirations and experiences of the artist. A Personal Path describes the journey that Swartz is on and which she expresses with her painting.
“The paintings by Swartz hanging in the University Church do not seek to illustrate the site...This provides the unique setting for Swartz’s paintings to engage in a fascinating dialogue with this former Benedictine Collegiate church, with its clarity and associations with Catholic iconography, and also with the meaning of the House of God...Here in the University Church Susan Swartz shines a light on the beauty of divine nature,” says the curator of the exhibition, Dieter Ronte. While walking through the exhibition, may each observer take his own personal path