Susan Swartz
Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalist, 1842
Park City, UT – Depicting nature at every season, with exquisitely nuanced brushwork, Susan Swartz came into her own as a transcendental realist, making paintings that seem full of perpetual youth, whatever the season, whatever the time of day. It was a wonderful way to welcome the new millennium—Winter Sun, 1999 was made at the end of the old one, Stand Alone, 2001 was made at the beginning of the new one—and they all showed, indeed, forcefully announced that nature was alive and well, the eternal return of the seasons suggesting it was immortal—no sign of death in it, as in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637-1638. It was also peculiarly timely, considering the fact that nature and women were “disrespected,” to use the trendy term, by the “patriarchy,” as Carolyn Merchant argued in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, 1980. Merchant demonstrates that a “historic shift away from seeing Earth as a living organism, and towards seeing it as a machine, was used to justify the domination of both nature and women.” No longer was nature a “mother,” no longer was Venus “increase giving,” “sole mistress of the nature of things,” as Lucretius wrote in De Rerum Natura, a symbol of the “creative process of nature,” but a sexless instrument to be used, a machine with “muscles of steel and arms of iron,” like the all-American Miss Urania in Huysmans’ A Rebours, “Against Nature.”
Excerpted from White Hot Magazine – July 2024
By Donald Kuspit