2007 - One Mountain Many Paths Special Edition (Hardcover) ISBN-13: 9780978934910 ISBN-10: 0978934911 Genres: Health, Fitness & Dieting, Religion & Spirituality ? |
“He painted the trees and gardens he cherished and the people he loved; because he was, happily, not unduly concerned, a style that came naturally to him shortly became his own distinctive 'style' - his signature - as uniquely his own as the subject content. Swift's peculiar style reminds us of nobody but the artist - a telling point with a painter who has set no store on this aspect of the job. In Swift we have, then, a man with an observation that is both curious and affectionate - for his attention to details in his subject is paternal and not academic.”Fernando De Azvedo (painter and President of Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon) writing in Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter In Portugal, produced for the Crawford Gallery exhibition in 2001:
"He did not allow himself to simply accept the nascent effervescence of post-war English art, although he did live in its midst and analysed it and commented upon it He maintained both a love of the figurative that he was never to relinquish, and a lack of interest in, and even an aversion to abstraction, geometric or otherwise.... Among his various influences we feel the presence of Giacometti and his infinite veils of grey, obsessively covering and uncovering a tortured and secret face These affinities were not enough to deflect him from his intuitive self. They constituted less a deliberate career focus and more a faith in an inner order, that manifested itself in his painting and writing. The artist distanced himself from fashion in order to grasp the permanent element which he believed he must seek in the world of painting, not just in that of his own day, but in that of all time, and in the relationship between art, reality and its interpretation."
"Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape....My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in."
“uncompromising clarity of vision which eschews the accidental or the obvious or the sentimental...[and] shows his power to convey the full impact of the object, as though the spectator were experiencing it for the first time”
Irish critics got a look at the work of a touseled young (25) man named Paddy Swift and tossed their caps in the air. Paddy's 30 canvases are as grey and gloomy as Dublin itself...harshly realistic paintings of dead birds and rabbits, frightened-looking girls and twisted potted plants. Their fascination is in the merciless, sharply etched details, as oppressive and inquiring as a back-room third degree. Dublin Understands. Wrote Critic Tony Gray in the Irish Times: Swift "unearths [from his subjects] not a story, nor a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence." Said the Irish Press: "An almost embarrassing candor . . . Here is a painter who seems to have gone back to the older tradition and to have given the most searching consideration to the composition of his painting." Dublin, which likes authors who write with a shillelagh, understood an artist who painted with one.The Word Is Tension. By 1950, Paddy was in Paris, living in a cheap Left Bank hotel and growing an existentialist beard. He had tackled Paris with £25 in his pockets, but that was soon gone, and he scrabbled a living doing commission portraits of American G.I.s and tourists. "No picture survived this period," he says. "I sold them all to buy food and drink." Nights, he went to the galleries, and there he found what he wanted to do. He liked such old French masters as the 17th century's Nicolas Poussin, the 19th century's Eugene Delacroix, such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti and Britain's Francis Bacon. The much-admired decorative style of the Matisses is not for Paddy Swift. "Art," he thinks, "is obviously capable of expressing something more closely related to life than these elegant designs."His main idea is to suggest the tensions he finds in life. "I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension...tension is the only word for it...can be painted."This is possibly Swift's only interview. Apart from his few statements made during this exhibition it seems Swift never spoke about his art.
“In London his style changed, not immediately, but gradually and very thoroughly. In fact, it was less a stylistic change than a transformation. From being a painter with sharp, angular lines and a thin paint surface, he became one who ‘drew with the brush’. Modelled in heavy, laden strokes, and in general, daubed and dragged the paint around until it did his bidding. Stylistically, his ‘first period’ and ‘second period’ could hardly be more different from one another, though the underlying sensibility somehow remains.”
"Are among the finest portraits painted in Britain at this period...Yet they were seen by only a handful of people, and in some cases were even lucky to have survived.”
“Although highly acclaimed in critical and artistic circles, the work of the Irish painter Patrick Swift has rarely been publicly exhibited...The vogue at the end of the 50s for abstract painting was not to his taste, nor could he work with academic realism. He sought an expression of life and human creativity which was meaningful and accessible, yet intensely personal, and inspired by emotion, by landscape. It seemed Ireland and England restricted him. Swift emigrated to Portugal in 1962. He later set up a pottery in the Algarve , whose part in the revival of the regional craft has been recognised. Here Swift made a huge contribution to the popularisation of the Algarve , and to the recognition of the beauty of Portugal 's landscape, history and culture...These are some of his most resonant works, where he has found his voice, and in the invigorating new climate the change in his painting was towards an enhanced sensuous warmth, a sense of the integrity of light and a feeling of the integration with nature, of painter and viewer."
“Almost all are of landscape subjects, or at least outdoor ones. Trees shimmer in the fierce white light, houses or cottages huddle into their fields or gardens, there is an abundant feeling of fertility and also of serenity. Figures are rare, though the human presence is implicit throughout. They have a faint flavour of Cézanne’s late watercolours, but they are bigger and also less formalised, looser and more lyrical. Taken as a sequence they represent one of the peaks of watercolour painting over the last forty years; certainly no Irish painter has done better".
"We were out to provide a platform for the individual vision, not accepted avant-gardisme or second-hand attitudes."- David Wright
The true begetter and leading light of X was Patrick Swift...Swift was, of course, responsible for the art side of the magazine. These were the boom years of abstract art. Swift, twenty years ahead of his time, launched a series of penetrating attacks on the cult as well as promoting the work of then unknown or unfashionable figurative painters, among them the young Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Aitchison, and such as-yet uncannonized painters as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and the forgotten David Bomberg. Examples of their work were reproduced; more importantly, it was Swift's idea that the artist should speak for themselves, which was achieved either by transcribing their tape-recorded conversation (not 'interviews', wherein questions loaded with some obtuse interogator's 'impercipience' tend to darken council), or by publishing their notes. Swifts’s unearthing and editing of David Bomberg’s outspoken and apocalyptic pensées, scattered about his miscellaneous papers, was an outstanding contribution."
" David Wright's and Patrick Swift's legendary X set the common agenda for a generation of European painters, writers and dramatists. "John McGahern: For John McGahern an extract from 'The End or Beginning of Love' which was reproduced in X was his first time in print and it led to a publishing deal: "I wrote a first novel with a pretentious title, The End or Beginning of Love. A friend was interested in it, Jimmy Swift, who was also responsible for getting Patrick Kavanagh into print at the time, liked it and sent it to his brother, Patrick Swift, who was editing a magazine called X in London with the poet David Wright. They liked it and published an extract. That was my first time in print. The magazine was influential, though, like most magazines of the kind, it was short lived. Many painters, like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, wrote for the magazine. I met these people when the magazine invited me to London. I was in my early twenties. I had very little experience of the world and found the bohemian lives around Soho fairly alarming. The extract in X attracted interest from a number of publishers. Fabers, among other publishers, wrote to me. T. S. Eliot was working at the firm then." In his essay 'The Bird Swift' McGahern noted that Swift mentioned, as they walked around the Mayfair galleries in the summer of 1960, that he admired L. S. Lowry and that anyone who could afford to buy a Lowry would make a fortune. There is an interesting RTÉ radio podcast on Swift and McGahern.
''All the basic dishes were of the local Lagoa pottery- easily breakable and poorly glazed. But aesthetically pleasing and so cheap that breakages were no tragedy. Replacements after all helped to encourage an industry threatened with extinction. Even now some of the nicer old kitchen objects can no longer be obtained at the pottery. ‘People don’t buy them anymore,’ say the potters, ‘so we’ve stopped making them.’''
"The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activitya picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas." - Swift
"A real painting...is something which happens in life not in art." - SwiftDuring his career Swift only held two solo exhibitions: Dublin in 1952 and Lisbon in 1974
My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.
Picturemaking is ludicrous in light of the awful times we must endure.
To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.
To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.
the most important factor, the element of mystery
A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it will never happen again and in this sense is an impossible object. It is judged by the painter simply as a success or failure without qualification. And it is something which happens in life not in art.
The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activitya picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas.
Its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown
[Art] speaks to us of resignation and rejoicing in reality, and does so through a transformation of our experience of the world into an order wherein all facts become joyous; the more terrible the material the greater the the artistic triumph...It is a transformation that is mysterious, personal and ethical...For it is always the reality of the particular that provides the occasion and the spring of art- it is always "those particular trees/ That caught you in their mysteries" or the experience of some loved object. Not that the matter rests here. It is the transcendent imagination working on this material that releases the mysterious energies which move and speak of deepest existence.
Swift on Caravaggio: " It is in the fact that no detail is unworthy of his love that affects us deeply, in painting the gesture in full rhetorical flower, he is at the same time in love with the very simple existence of the object apart from its significance in action."
...It would be phony, however, to pretend too great a concern for the effects of the system of selling pictures on the character of contemporary painters. It is very likely unhealthy and occasionally disastrous even to some people of real talent. Yet the nature of art is so strange, so unpredictable, and the circumstances of its production so remote from the world of commerce that it would appear the truth is less alarming than the facts might lead one to suppose. It is possible that the occasions of corruption being so frequent the flowering of genuine vision is all the more intense, the more purified, and consequently more valuable than ever.
The ethics of art are terrifying because real art by increasing our knowledge of ourselves increases in exactly the same proportion the ethical commitment.
Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape. Picturemaking is ludicrous in the light of the awful times we must endure. It is sufficient to contemplate the nature of composition to see that the picture itself is impossible... My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.
The only indication of an individual vision is an individual style.
The interesting thing is what happens in the specific picture: its precision in terms of the sensations it produces- the illusion it creates and the effect of this illusion on the psychology opposed to it... General philosophical and technical information however interesting in itself is secondary to this reality.
Encountering a work of art is in many respects rather like meeting a person. One may not recognise his quality at first, may be put off by a surface aspect and find out later he is quite different etc.
The old saying, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’, expresses the opposite idea to that which animates the painter before his canvas. It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.
Metaphysics- what metaphysics do those trees have?
Those painters who to-day work under the banner or label of the Modern, the Progressive, can hardly accuse the public of not taking notice.
For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.
Obey God- live life spontaneously.
Dear Hemmingway Ryan,
A strange thing — I was thinking of Swift and Cronin and all when I saw this — I shed a tear of tequila into my vaso.F Scott BehanI’d better say ‘Kavanagh’ would loved the place’ — I’m quite sure he wouldn’t — I hope he’s well. “(Swift & Cronin stopped speaking to Behan due, in their view, to Behan's ill treatment of Kavanagh)
2007 - One Mountain Many Paths Special Edition (Hardcover) ISBN-13: 9780978934910 ISBN-10: 0978934911 Genres: Health, Fitness & Dieting, Religion & Spirituality |
Thank you for your patience