Patrick Swift (12 August 1927 – 19 July 1983) was an Irish painter who worked in Dublin, London and the Algarve, Portugal.
Overview In Dublin he formed part of the Envoy arts review / McDaid's pub circle of artistic and literary figures.A circle that included Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin and Brendan Behan. In London he moved into the Soho bohemia where, with the poet David Wright, he founded and co-edited X magazine. In Portugal he continued painting while also writing and illustrating books on Portugal and founding Porches Pottery, which revived a dying industry. During his lifetime Swift had only two solo exhibitions. His first exhibition at the Waddington Gallery, Dublin, in 1952 was well acclaimed. For Swift, however, his art seems to have been a personal and private matter."Throughout his years in London, when he was right at the nerve centre of its art and literary life, he showed little interest in exhibiting his work." – Brian Fallon, "Patrick Swift and Irish Art", Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001(first published: Portfolio 2 – Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993); "Lucian Freud asks me if he is going to show in the new London Waddington's, I answer that I did not think so, that I do not think he is interested in exhibiting his paintings. We are both puzzled." – Anthony Cronin, Patrick Swift 1927–83, Gandon Editions Biography, 1993; "And one day I found him in his underground flat in Westbourne Terrace busily taking down all his canvases (or rather hardboards, for in those days he couldn't afford canvas) from the walls and stowing them away in a cellar. His reason was: a millionaire art fancier had rung up to say he was calling and Swift did not want him to buy, or so much as see, his work." – David Wright, Patrick Swift 1927–83, Gandon Editions, 1993; "In the world in which we all moved at that time, I used to be curious as to the detachment Paddy showed to the market place, at his indifference to the fashionable galleries where Freud and Bacon were the beckoning lights, along with Frank Auerbach; it was as if he'd taken Joyce's Stephen Daedalus to heart – that once the work is created, it is no longer anything to do with the artist, who simply stands aside and pares his nails." – Martin Green, Patrick Swift 1927–83, Gandon Editions, 1993; "Many people assumed he had stopped painting altogether" – Brian Fallon, "The fall and rise of Patrick Swift", The Irish Times, 11 June 1992 In 1993 the Irish Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of Swift's work.
Work
He was a figurative painter. (Aidan Dunne: "He was a representational artist through and through...Fidelity to visual experience above all.""He was a representational artist through and through, in the Kokoschka mould. Fidelity to visual experience above all." – Aidan Dunne, "The lost hope of Irish art", The Sunday Tribune, 28 November 1993) Though his style changed considerably over the years, his essential personality as an artist never did. He was plainly not interested in the formalist aspects of Modernism. He wanted art to have an expressive, emotive, even psychological content, though not in any literary sense."Though his style changed considerably over the years, his essential personality as an artist never did. He was plainly not interested in the formalist aspects of Modernism... He wanted art to have an expressive, emotive, even psychological content, though not in any literary sense."— Brian Fallon,"Patrick Swift and Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001 Anthony Cronin: "He was never in any doubt that painting was a re-creation of what the painter saw: in his own case at least not what the painter had seen or could imagine, but what he was actually looking at during the act of painting. A faithfulness of the sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art… [which] had nothing to do with description…What was at stake was a faithful recreation of the truth to the artist of the experience, in the painter's case the visual experience, the artist being admittedly only one witness, one accomplice during and after the fact. Of course this faithfulness did not rule out expressionist overtones. The truth was doubtless subjective as well as objective. Swift's blues and greys were usually properties of what he was painting. They were also part of his vision of things, properties of his mind. We felt then that time could only find its full expression through an art that was frugal, ascetic, puritanical even."Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1993, Catalogue. Essays on Swift by Anthony Cronin (poet) and Aidan Dunne (art critic ): He was never in any doubt that painting was a re-creation of what the painter saw: in his own case at least not what the painter had seen or could imagine, but what he was actually looking at during the act of painting. A faithfulness of the sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art… [which] had nothing to do with description…What was at stake was a faithful recreation of the truth to the artist of the experience, in the painter's case the visual experience, the artist being admittedly only one witness, one accomplice during and after the fact. Of course this faithfulness did not rule out expressionist overtones. The truth was doubtless subjective as well as objective. Swift's blues and greys were usually properties of what he was painting. They were also part of his vision of things, properties of his mind. We felt then that time could only find its full expression through an art that was frugal, ascetic, puritanical even...In faraway Paris, Samuel Beckett felt the same thing, writing the trilogy that was to give asceticism, frugality, puritanisim and the bitter humour that lies at the heart of the joke that is life, their full expression. Swift's avoidance of warm colours... was born in that time and afterwards harked back to it
Although he commented on art Swift never affiliated with any official or quasi-official art group or "style".John Ryan (founder of Envoy) in his introduction to Swift for the Rosc Catalogue 1971 (which included Swift's portrait of Kavanagh): "'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" – Rosc Catalogue, Irish Imagination, 1971; see also Adams auctioneers catalogue notes ; and in Envoy (1951): "No clichés are employed to simplify his task and no tricks are superimposed to foster an illusion of originality. Academicians and abstractionists will equally deplore him, and probably for the same reasons. He has rejected the debased technique of the one and the dogmas of the other. He paints what he sees." – "Patrick Swift", by John Ryan, Envoy: A Review of Literature and Art, July 1951, vol 5/20 He had three distinct "periods": Dublin, London, and Algarve.His early work in Dublin, where he used a thin paint surface, has a tense, spare, more-real-than-real quality. In London he became more expressive in his use of paint, applying thick layers of paint, using the brush more and "modelling" the paint surface. In the Algarve he continues this trend into a heavy, broken impasto and some of his later work verges on becoming abstract. His work comprises portraits, "tree portraits" (trees held a special fascination for SwiftJohn McGahern (Swift drew his portrait in London in 1960) noted that he was fond of the line "those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries": "It was he who first told me how well Constable wrote in letters about trees, especially the plane trees, with their peeled strips of bark – 'They soak up the polluted air' – and he quoted a favourite line, 'those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries', mentioning that he preferred trees to flowers" ("The Bird Swift", Love of the World, John McGahern, Edited by Stanley van der Ziel, Faber & Faber, 2009). Swift wrote in his Italian Notebook (Gandon Editions 1993): "I think that I probably have a real talent for painting trees if I developed it assiduously. I want to give them great density and depth pile heaps of detail into them and yet keep the sense of presence which is the whole point. I have started the painting of the palm tree outside the window. I can go straight at it because I have wanted to paint one for so long and have looked longingly into them so often in so many places". His later work is almost exclusively "tree portraits" and rural landscapes. Lima de Freitas (Gandon Editions 1993) writing about Swift's Algarve tree paintings: "Here his painting, which before had been sophisticated and 'cultured', was stripped bare and became a paean of praise, both voluptuous and sacred, to a perennial Spring. His exaltation bursts forth in a blaze of colour – like in Soutine, but a Soutine of happiness. He is intoxicated by a joy that casts away the erudite codes of style and revelled in the tangibility of the natural world. Impatiently, Patrick Swift searches out the roots of inner essence. A conjunction of opposites, of a characteristically fiery imagination and the cool verdure of plants and trees produced a kind of 'naturalism' – but one which is the antithesis of timid conformity and mediocrity and could only have emerged from a process of rediscovering and reshaping a lost innocence... Patrick Swift's paintings are an act of praise and wonder." Swift in 1952 also mentions "naturalism": "He sees an inevitable swing in modern art from surrealism to naturalism, but adds at once: 'It must be a purely visual and personal naturalism without the formulae of the academics.'"(AN IRISHMAN'S DIARY – QUIDNUNC, Seamus Kelly, The Irish Times, 11 October 1952)), rural landscapes and urban landscapes. He worked in a variety of media including oils, watercolour, ink, charcoal, lithography and ceramics.