Susan Swartz’s paintings were born of suffering that has blossomed into gratitude. The artist, who splits her time between Park City and Martha’s Vineyard, endured severe auto-immune disease for 10 years. Yet her paintings are an explosion of flowers, fruits and exuberant color on the canvas, an energetic tribute to life.
Swartz’s work was most recently featured in Park City as part of Art in Bloom at Susan Swartz Studios during the 2025 Kimball Arts Festival. The exhibition showcased a unique collaboration between Swartz’s abstract paintings and Hayden Hull of Lamb’s Ear Floral Designs. Swartz’s paintings, based on studies of flowers, inspired Hull to create new floral arrangements using native Utah flowers. This creative exchange formed a cycle of inspiration with flowers inspiring paintings, which in turn inspired new floral works. It speaks to the profundity and fecundity of nature itself: seeds bear plants and flowers bear fruit that bears seeds.
Swartz’s career as an artist has also born great fruit. She has been honored with solo exhibitions in major cities from New York to Berlin and Beijing. Her works are in public collections including the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah; Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City; National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; and Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Pieces are also on display inside U.S. embassies in New Zealand, Hungary and China as part of the Art in Embassies program. Her work is sold through Georges Bergès Gallery in New York and at Susan Swartz Studios in Park City.
At the peak of her auto-immune illness, which was triggered by fish-borne mercury poisoning and Lyme disease, Swartz had five co-infections and couldn’t hold her paintbrush for longer than an hour. She understands the illness with all its concurrent infections to be the result of environmental contamination, so she’s often asked, “Why not depict the devastation of the environment in your paintings?” Instead, Swartz paints nature in its full glory, not in its polluted state. To answer the question, she says nature was intended by its Creator to be beautiful, healthy and whole.
“I want to paint the environment from how it’s meant to be: wild, lively and thriving. That’s how I want to live,” she says. “I want to live in its beauty.”
The joyful aspect of Swartz’s work developed naturally as she began to heal, supported by alternative therapies and natural foods. She moved from painting realism to abstraction; painting from the brain to painting from the soul. Classical art training at the collegiate level and years of teaching high school art in Princeton, New Jersey, helped Swartz interpret emotional and visual impressions onto canvas in her own way.
While healing, she suddenly found a deep well of energy. “Not only can you see life again, but you’re living life,” she recalls. The exuberance of the moment made its way onto the canvas in thick layers of acrylic paint and built-up glazes, laid in heavy with brushes and palette knives. Even the choice to move from oil paint to acrylic was made from health considerations.
A new idea hit full steam when Swartz began incorporating the very foods that were part of her healing journey into what became multimedia works. These grew into three distinct series. Nuts, seeds and thinly sliced fruits and gourds are embedded in the Evolution of Nature series. A profusion of petals, buds and whole flower heads can be seen, while Nature’s Bouquet and Boundless are all about layered paint that mimics natural elements like petals carried on the wind.
In 2005, Swartz was honored by Harvard Divinity School for a career that blends artistry and faith. Twenty years later, a solo show at King’s College, Cambridge University in the U.K., again honored this admixture of art and spirituality. When introducing Swartz at the opening, Provost Gillian Tett commented that the artist’s work represents “chaotic natural glory,” a glory that belongs to God and a chaos that is more joyful frenzy than disorganized uproar.
In her first solo European show, Personal Path, Swartz’s paintings debuted at the Kollegienkirche, a renowned Baroque cathedral in Salzburg, Austria. The ornate but monochromatic white interior allowed the glory of the natural world showcased in her paintings to come spilling into the sanctified space. This suited Swartz well as she listens to hymns while painting in her Park City studio. “I feel like I’m getting stuff from nature, and I think of who created it — so I just like to keep that ambience,” she says. Personal Path would go on to tour through Europe and Asia for the next four years.
When she was ill, it took too much energy to work on large canvases, so in gratitude for feeling well, the painter now uses them frequently. However, small works accompany the large ones in shows, as seen in Three Dimensions displayed in Berlin’s Galerie Noack in 2021. This is another organic development. As the preliminary layers on one painting cure, Swartz starts another. Above all, she likes the challenge of making balanced compositions on square canvases and leaving them unframed, painting beyond the surface and onto the canvas’s edges.
Being part of the Park City community for more than two decades has inspired Swartz and her husband, Jim, to give back. They are founding members of Impact Partners, a group of investors who support filmmakers in telling stories about social issues. They also founded Christian Center of Park City (CCPC), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2025. CCPC’s motto is “meeting people at their point of need as an expression of God’s love” through a variety of offerings such as food pantries, thrift stores and counseling.
Swartz is governed by her faith and a personal code that is formalized in a threefold concept: care of self, care of planet and care of community. Care of self has been essential since Swartz’s diagnosis of Lyme disease, which will remain in her system for life. Care of planet flows naturally from this need since the foods that contributed to Swartz’s healing can only be produced in a healthy environment. Finally, care of community flows from a sense of gratitude. This third value is shared through her paintings and support of CCPC simultaneously.
“That’s the whole point of my paintings,” Swartz says.“How can we get people to look and appreciate what we’ve been given here?”
