Susan Swartz: Personal Path

The spirituality of nature and painting as a contemplative process are the key themes addressed by the American artist Susan Swartz. To appreciate the meditative aura of her paintings, a different mode of seeing is required. For her work neither articulates clearly defined themes nor elevates abstraction to the subject matter itself. Rather she interrogates the categories of beauty and aesthetics from her own deeply personal perspective. Swartz‘s paintings are the expression of the creative aspirations of an artist who challenges us to reflect fundamentally upon the dimensions and structures of our very existence.

Applying layer upon layer of paint onto the large-format canvases in abstract gestures, Swartz succeeds in capturing the beauty of the natural world in her work. As Dieter Ronte observes, her paintings “bear witness to the artist's personal introversion, her journey of self-discovery and self-empowerment through the painterly act of release; abounding in romanticisms, they are infused with yearning and love, and engaged in a permanent quest for the familiarly enigmatic, for the psyche of man in nature and for a universal poetry, which at once melds science, religion, and the visual arts.”