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BY HIS FRIENDS
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The Dublin Years
Anthony Cronin
I first met Paddy Swift in O’Dwyer’s off Lesson Street... He was employed in some capacity in the Gas Company, but he never mentioned the nature of his duties, nor did I ever enquire. He had no doubt that he was a painter... Anything else was a temporary necessity or inconvenience, boring perhaps, or, in some lights, amusing. In fact the first thing you became aware of about him was the strength and certainty of his vocation. He even had a sketch book with him, though I never remember him carrying one again...
He was the first painter I had ever met, though I had seen one or two of those who went to such places - Harry Kernoff or Seán O'Sullivan — around the bars. It was a great relief to meet an artist who was not an aspirant poet. One saw things in a clearer light; and, of course, to meet Swift was something special. It seems to me now that even at that first meeting we discovered a certain consanguinity of purpose, a shared view of what art was about, and that I felt as one always did with him — that by having a certain view of art you had already attained something and escaped from something... To feel this was important to me at the time and it remained important during the years I knew him, though perhaps it was more so at the beginning than afterwards, for I knew nobody else then who had quite this vocational certainty.
Memory telescopes. I do not remember by what stages our acquaintance grew and the Swift of that evening seems to me to be the Swift of later, in appearance, in attitude and in manner, though probably he was not. Of course he probably already had that aquiline look and those piercing eyes. He probably gave the same impression of deftness and precision in gesture and movement, and may have been just as eloquent. But the immense self-assurance of later on, the sometimes cruel centrality of his grasp of character, the way of assuming that everything he told you confirmed a sort of shared joke about the world, did he already have those? I somehow doubt it...
What we thought about art was, more or less, that it should be truthful and exact... Swift's attitude to painting was that it should be a truthful recapitulation of the visible world and psychologically truthful as well...
Another transition and still no attempt at chronology: to Hatch Street, to the ground-floor and basement flat which John Ryan had spent the early months of his marriage. I have the front room, almost bare of furniture except for the large portrait of myself by Swift over the mantelpiece and some books. The other room on the hall floor is Paddy's studio. John Beckett and Vera have a room downstairs. We all, supposedly, pay rent to Claire, who deals with John.
In the morning the sun comes through the high white window of my room, but before I am up I can hear Paddy, who is already at his easel, through the folding doors which divide the two rooms.
Lucian Freud, who is staying in Dublin comes to paint for some weeks also...
One evening, Paddy leafs through a book of MacNeice's which I have. Then he gestures to a Soul for Sale which is on the mantelpiece. 'There seems to me to be more actual poetry in the Kavanagh', he says. He is right. Whatever the mysterious essence we call poetry is, there is more of it in Kavanagh.
Why does one remember one thing more than another? We walk across Leeson Street and down Pembroke Street to meet Kavanagh in the Pembroke Lounge. We encounter him at the door and go in together. The pub is crowded. Swift surveys the scene. 'The dying and the lovers soon to part', he says, quoting Auden. Why has that remained, a fragment, when so much else is forgotten?...
I will leave things where others can take them up, some time in the early fifties. X and Westbourne Terrace are nearly a decade away. At the top of Parkway, just where Camden Town gives way to open spaces, occasional coppices and regency terraces of the park, is or was, a small row of three-storey houses in which we take a flat. This he quickly transforms into a studio by the simple expedient of throwing out the landlord’s carpet and much of his furniture... As things turn out he does not live there but with Oonagh in Hampstead, but he comes up to paint more or less every day; again, often before I am up. He has had a show in Waddington’s in Dublin, a big success, but he has moved to London. When, one day (which may have been later on), 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. If I was trying to write that kind of piece I would try and analyse Paddy’s attitude to success, so pure and ascetic from one aspect, but also so in love with a certain idea of it. In a way he does not need to be a success, he has always been one, and people sense this about him immediately...
In Camden Town he is painting the tree which is just outside the window. It takes him, as everything did, a long time to paint. It is early summer. The tree is old but its leaves are green. This is a long time ago.
— Anthony Cronin, Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
Patrick Swift In His Time
Anthony Cronin (IMMA Retrospective Catalogue, 1993)
Patrick Swift may have been a night-time student in the College of Art when I first met him in the late forties, but I never thought of him as an art student. To me he was a painter; and already someone whose certainty of purpose was as remarkable as his talent. Of course he had a job, but it was understood that this was a temporary inconvenience; and within, I think, some months of our first meeting he had in fact given this up in order to do what he wanted to do most and did best.
Looking at his early work now I am amazed at the maturity and self-possession that was already evident in it. And there is not only a clear grasp of technique and purpose, but his principal subject matter has already been decided on.
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 this sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art. In conversation he — we — associated this faithfulness, this "truth" which might be possible in painting with an equivalent truth or honesty to experience which might be possible in literature, even in poetry, generally speaking the least faithful and the most false of the arts...
But this truth of which we spoke had nothing to do with description... Description is usually illusionism of one sort or another, the quickness of the hand supposedly deceiving the eye. What was at stake was a faithful re-creation 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, puritanism 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...
He had met Freud by 1949... My grasp of chronology is not always accurate, but certainly the acquaintance was well-developed by 1950 when we shared the ground-floor of a house in Hatch Street together. Lucian, who was staying in Ireland, used to come around in the mornings to paint, so that sometimes when I would surface around ten or eleven I would find them both at work in the studio next door...
Certainly the influence of Lucian was strong, as why should it not be?... But there is, it should be said, an inevitability in such conjunctions which is part of the zeitgeist for those who feel it intensely enough. The obscure psychological alchemy which brought Swift to the painter's art in the first place brought him also to the requisite acquaintance and the requisite influence.
There is in both painters an intensity which may at first not seem justified by the actual subject matter, a sense of life as always, even in its banalities, perhaps especially in those, verging on horror and partaking of tragedy, something which overtly surrealist painting often aims at and misses. There is the same unwavering regard for the object, an entelechy which has somehow come into existence in a manner that supersedes time and abrogates all space except the space in which it now stands. Doubtless such a painting as Interior in Paddington had a profound influence on Swift (though I see it is dated 1951 when he was already painting works whose manner would seem to have been affected by it... But beyond a certain point influence is really no more than an indication of possibility; and some of the differences were apparent to me even then. He is for example less concerned with surface and texture than Freud was at that point and less obsessional in his painting of it...
In the pages of X and in his writings generally, may be seen also the influence of Charles Baudelaire, which was profound. In what I believe to be his only imagined work, painted from the Nadar photograph to which I directed him, he has acknowledged this influence. Baudelaire stands in Swift's own studio, behind a table strewn with his brushes and jars, the workaday clutter of the space in which art is created. Swift was a literate, but not a literary painter. His judgement of literature was usually very sharp and accurate, though this sharpness is not reflected in some of what he wrote about it.
The influence of Cézanne was lifelong... Because his only show took place in Dublin in the 1950s, an impression was created in these parts that he had given up painting. For the decreasing number of those who knew or cared anything about him, he had somehow disappeared off the map. We live in a time when all activities take place in the shadow-land of media publicity... Swift of course went on painting and paying homage through his work to the trees and foliage of the natural world. His painting became not less austere or less ascetic but more affirmative. In the contemplation and re-creation of these woody, self-supporting stems and trunks with their abundant leafage he found a happiness which was not dependent on human response or the satisfaction of ambition.
— Anthony Cronin, IMMA Retrospective Catalogue, 1993
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John Ryan (founder of Envoy magazine)
...He was a friend of a number of friends of mine and we were near enough contemporaries. Dublin tended towards being a more Bohemian town then than it is now. Yet there was no government patronage of the arts then at all. Two particular friends were the poets Anthony Cronin and John Jordan...
It was I who introduced Paddy (as we called him then) to another Paddy, namely Patrick Kavanagh — undoubtedly the most important poet since WB Yeats... Swift, in fact, made a decided impact on Kavanagh. It is hard to believe now that it was mainly a cultural impact and that he actually changed the older man's entire approach to poetry...
And all the time Swift was painting. Portraits, especially, came from his easel at an astonishing rate... his output was prodigious down the years. He was quite audacious in his approach to painting too. I remember him setting up an enormous canvas in the garden of Hatch Street in Dublin where his studio then was, and, without any further ado, painting a portrait of a girl without any preliminary sketches or without squaring off the canvas, without any preliminary work whatever. Yet the finished product looked well thought out, as if it were the result of mature judgement. I had at the time a 16mm movie camera, and panning the camera from the painting to the subject, to and fro, captured the scene on film. I used to show this film to the two Paddies (Swift and Kavanagh) and they could never get enough.
I made a number of these colour films including one of Kavanagh and Swift and Cronin ambling along on a summer's day by the banks of Dublin's Grand Canal.
— John Ryan, Gandon Editions, 1993
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John Jordan (poet, critic and short story writer)
…the painter Patrick Swift, who died in the Algarve in Portugal in July 1983. It was on 20 July at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan that I heard the news from the novelist and former secretary of the Arts Council, Mervyn Wall, who had found it in The Irish Times. There were others present, but I doubt if any of them was as much affected as myself; after all, Patrick, had been in exile for well over twenty years, and his return visits were brief and infrequent. I myself had met him on only two of those visits, which involved a memorable but scarcely recountable trip to the Drogheda home of the painter Nano Reid (who died in 1982), whom he not alone admired immensely as an artist but loved as a person, though she was about twenty years older...
We first met when... with unwonted audacity and quite exceptional naïveté, I founded the Synge Street Literary Society and to the first meeting... there came some past pupils: Mr Anthony Hughes... the late John O'Donovan... and Patrick Swift... In the next four years or so he became involved in the texture of my life... I knew at the time that Patrick Swift painted, but at this stage, I must confess that I hardly took him seriously; if anything he struck me as being a literary man...
By 1950 he had abandoned his job in the Gas Company and moved into a room in a house in Lower Baggot Street, which once contained a modern art gallery called Contemporary Pictures. It was there he painted his first portrait of me which was reproduced in the magazine Envoy whose editor-in-chief was to become his brother-in-law. John Ryan also published an article Patrick Swift wrote on Nano Reid. Among others he was to paint at that time were the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the novelist-to-be, Julia O’Faolain. By 1951 Patrick Swift had moved into a flat in Hatch Street and it was there that he painted his second portrait of me. I do not know where the two portraits are now.
But it was not those vanished images of my youth I though of during the next few days at Annaghmakerrig. Only of what seemed the enchanted world of my late teens, where the Master of the Revels, the tragic-comedian-in-chief, was Patrick Swift from Rialto, from Synge Street, from Baggot Street, from Hatch Street and after that, an Anglo-Portuguese world I was never to know. Perhaps I spoke too sentimentally about Patrick Swift to my fellow-guests at Annaghmakerrig: the night before I left, the writer Dermot Healy read to them a verse-letter I had addressed to Patrick Swift in 1948, and which I was foolhardy enough to include in a book published twenty-seven years later. I am so glad now that I did. Here is some of it:
Thespis’s children stick together
In sunlight and shadow and weather
When the proud rose must surely fall…
Yes, mine was a mime of lime scent and quiet heart
Yours one of cypresses and blood on the snow
Thirty-eight years ago, neither of us dreamed that the proud rose would waste away in the South of Portugal. I must one day go and see if near his grave in Porches in the Algarve there are cypresses.
— John Jordan (poet, critic and short story writer), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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Patrick Swift - A Memoir
Martin Green (writer, editor and publisher)
...Anthony Cronin, fresh over from his adventures in France with Brendan Behan, was a newcomer to the circle, and it was shortly after meeting him that I first recall ever meeting Patrick Swift...
I find trying to adhere to any kind of chronological sequence in a memoir such as this, difficult and distracting, but it was in that basement flat that Patrick Kavanagh sheltered on and off for a while. And it is the mention of Kavanagh that brings back to me that infectious gaiety and generosity that is at the heart of my memory of Paddy Swift... It was he, together with Tony Cronin, who initially put up the idea of bringing together Kavanagh's poems for the Collected Poems, for which the author finally thanked me ungrudgingly in his Introduction to that most arduous of tasks. For Paddy Swift, above all, had a profound belief in the value of poetry, and of the poet as a maker... 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.
Paddy Swift had a catalytic enthusiasm that ignited a response elsewhere. I remember being introduced by him to John McGahern, then a shy, red-faced young teacher in the East End of London. I read his first novel, which I recommended for publication but was overruled, and, on being asked by him who he should turn to, told him to go to Faber & Faber... It was he who brought to my attention the Charles Sisson version of Catullus, which I subsequently published, when I still worked as a publisher. It was he who helped to find a publisher for Brian Higgins, whose short and savage life at the hands of literary London began with the Swift's generous hospitality in that same basement flat in Westbourne Terrace. And it was here, in the midst of the chaos of family life with small children and impecunious friends, that Paddy undertook those portraits of poets that have yet to take their place in the artistic record of the times...
I am very grateful to Paddy and to Oonagh of course, for a period I spent with them in the Algarve, shortly after they had moved out there. I learnt things there about the nature of the richness of artistic isolation that have remained with me...
Paddy Swift was the most generous of men in the truest of all possible ways. He knew that all was a distraction that did not lend itself to the creation of what makes life tolerable on earth. He knew, as Paddy Kavanagh knew, how to 'Snatch out of time the passionate transitory'.
— Martin Green (writer, editor and publisher), Gandon Editions, 1993
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Sitting for Swift
C.H. Sisson (poet, translator)
...when Paddy said he would do a drawing of me I managed to fit in a number of lunch-time visits to the studio. At first I went to his basement flat, where he started a pencil drawing. It left him ill-satisfied at the time and one day I arrived to find him with the paraphernalia of oils. The scene of action moved to an empty third-floor room at the other end of Westbourne Terrace which Paddy was then using as a point of vantage from which to paint the trees below. While he looked down on trees, poets came upstairs to him. Paddy had done his glowering and veridical, but slightly decorative, portrait of George Barker some time before; it looked down at one from under glass in the living-room of Paddy’s basement. In the upstairs studio where I sat, a rather bulbous David Wright was gradually being reduced to order on another canvas. Brian Higgins was under treatment, either then or shortly afterwards…I was not obliging in the time I gave but Paddy seemed to accommodate himself to anything. Indeed, I got the impression that, so long as he was painting, it did not matter what. In fact, it always turned out to be a tree or a poet — this secondary, and no doubt less satisfactory, subject-matter has since been eliminated, and not only, I imagine, because the supply ran out. It was as if to lie in the line of vision of that eye inevitably involved translation on to canvas. Paddy fussed about none of those things I imagined a painter who kept his reference to the external world would fuss about. He did not mind if the sitting was short, he did not mind if the times and so the light were different. He ignored the state of light, so far as I could make out, with his trees, for he started early and worked all day at them, except when a poet crossed his path. These variations were part of the nuance of reality. The finished picture would perhaps be one that captured enough of the nuance. On these matters I speculate ignorantly. The finished picture, on Paddy's account, had to be one that looked ordinary but proved in the end not to be so. I have not put it as he did. While he painted, Paddy talked about the stream of friends which flowed through his flat or whom he met in pubs. Although when painting Paddy appeared to be all eye, with the hand just doing the necessary, the conversation which ran in parallel with this performance showed a rare lucidity... It will of course be the painting that remains. I can testify that it has an unusual aptitude for remaining. One or two of these pictures have been before my eyes daily for years... What I have learned is that, after being looked at habitually for some time, most work goes soft at some point. It proves to have elements which in the end do not continue to justify themselves. I can testify that with Paddy's painting it is not so. It is possible not to begin to see a painting of his, properly speaking. What is not possible is to stop seeing it, once you have begun.
— CH Sisson, Gandon Editions, 1993
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C.H. Sisson, On the Look-Out (a partial autobiography)
...when Patrick Swift painted my portrait... Paddy was going to do a pencil drawing. He did in fact do one, but it left him ill-satisfied at the time and one day I arrived to find the paraphernalia of oils... While he painted, Paddy talked about the stream of friends which flowed through his flat or whom he met in pubs. Hugh MacDiarmid had been there one morning; I regretted not having met him... John Heath-Stubbs at that time lived under a pavement round the corner, and made tea in a cavern too obscure for any but a half-blind man. It was and is unintelligible to me that so much learning can go with so little sight. One day I arrived to find his carapace beginning to take shape on another canvas, though it was still a little while before we met. For Paddy the human character exists, I suppose; at any rate when he had finished with them his sitters had betrayed themselves... Paddy hated great dollops of reading matter, as far as I could make out, but operated powerfully on a piece big enough to be brought within his line of vision at one time. I also judged that, but for a deep-seated instinct of generosity, Paddy would have had some talent for affairs. Decidedly this was not a man who had taken to painting through an incapacity for other things.
The world evoked by Patrick Swift's conversation was the natural antithesis of the one I inhabit. In it, people put the business of being poets or painters first and other things organized themselves round that. Paddy appeared to be able to manage this while holding himself equally responsible for his family. I greatly admired the economic nonchalance of this world...
— C.H. Sisson, On the Look-Out (a partial autobiography), Carcanet Press, 1989
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The Bird Swift
John McGahern (writer)
...Through the youngest of the Swift's, Tony, I had come to know most of his family. In a small house in Carrick Terrace, which was suffused with his mother's extraordinary charm, I saw his drawings and paintings for the first time — I remember with particular vividness a small watercolour of a Rialto sweetshop — and it was there I was given Come Dance with Kitty Stobling to read in a typescript Jimmy Swift had made for Kavanagh at that time.
I met Patrick Swift in London in 1960, and saw him over a few weeks of that hot summer. He was living with Oonagh and their daughters Katty and Julie in a basement flat in Westbourne Terrace. As well as painting and drawing he was editing the magazine X with David Wright, and they had accepted the first piece of prose I published. Sometimes I stayed with him over night and we spent whole days together... I think he worked in borrowed studios and was looking for a permanent studio. I remember going with him to look at rooms for rent, but they were all either too expensive or depressing...
We often walked across Kensington Gardens to the Victoria and Albert, where I remember him enquiring about obtaining a ticket to the Reading Room with a view to working on some essays he was planning to write for X. We always looked at the Constable. 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, ‘Bring in the particular trees/ That caught you in their mysteries’, mentioning that he preferred trees to flowers...
He was tall, with thick black hair that sometimes fell across his face as he argued, and he had inherited his mother’s bird-like features. He wore casual, inexpensive clothes, black or blue shirts, and he was one of those people who always look elegant no matter what they wear. He moved at ease among all kinds of people...
Most of our evenings ended in Soho. They would start quietly enough near Lancaster Gate in a genteel bar... Sometimes there would be an argument between Paddy and David Wright as to whether to travel into Soho by the underground or by taxi. Paddy usually won. He loved travelling by taxi. We would go to the Swiss pub and then to the French... Later we would climb the narrow stairs to Muriel’s, then end the evening dancing into the hopeful hours at the Mandrake. ‘All Men are False said my Mother’ was a hit that year. Elizabeth Smart played it over and over on the jukebox. After such a night Paddy would be up at seven the next morning, bathe Katty and Julie, bring Oonagh tea or coffee in bed, toss the girls high into the air, playing and laughing with them as he dressed them and gave them breakfast. Then he would go to whatever borrowed studio he had.
Sometimes he would need to go into town to buy paints or canvas or on business connected with X, to see printers or to look for advertising, and I would go with him. I think he enjoyed this. Crafts and trades fascinated him… We always walked. We enjoyed walking, always looking around, talking about what we saw or something he was reminded of. None of this was in the least bit self-conscious but part of a vital energy... 'Well Kavanagh is at least a man of some genius. Why don't you try and see more of him?'
I told him that I had no inclination to go through the barrage of insult and abuse that seemed the necessary initiation to the doubtful joy of Kavanagh's company and that I preferred to read the work. I suggested that it might have been easier for him because he was from the city and a painter.
— Not at all,' he laughed. 'The first time we met I was told that I was nothing but a gurrier and a fucking intellectual fraud.'
— 'What happened then?'
— 'Naturally after that I ignored him. Then one day Patrick McDonough took me to lunch — he was a Guinness rep, as well as a good minor poet and a charming man. After lunch we went into a bar and had a brandy at the counter. Kavanagh was at the back of the bar, with newspapers, probably the racing pages, and he was coughing and muttering and shifting around all the time we were there. McDonough had a business appointment and couldn't stay. As soon as he left, Kavanagh came up to the counter and demanded 'What are you doing with that fraud McDonough?' As soon as I explained, he said, 'You shouldn't be wastin' your time with fucking phoneys like that. I've been thinking about you and I think you may well be the real thing!'
To my surprise, he hadn't told the story to Jimmy Swift, and when I told it to Jimmy, who knew Kavanagh, he went into hoots of laughter: 'I think we can safely say that it was no sudden critical insight that led to that conversation.'
I asked Paddy once how he rhymed Kavanagh's often boorish self with the sensitive and delicate verses. 'My dear boy, separation of Art and Life', he laughed outright. 'All those delicate love poems are addressed to himself, even if it is sometimes by way of God. Such sensitivity would be wasted on a mere Other. He once told me that he often used to dip into American poetry anthologies to put him into an inspirational mood in the mornings, but nowadays I think the very thought of his own importance is sufficient to get him into orbit.'
I think he understood perfectly the mixture of child and monster, fool and knave that went into the wayward intelligence of Kavanagh's genius. Out of the understanding has grown a deep, comic sympathy... 'He could be a dreadful coward as well as a bully. Once I got a frantic phonecall from him sulking in Pembroke Road. There was a bunch of Americans at O'Faolain's who wanted to meet him. He wouldn't go unless I came with him: "We will be moving into enemy territory." We went to O'Faolain's and he was like a mouse all evening. Of course there were roars afterwards; yet he can be funny and marvelous sometimes...'
He loved David Wright and David Gascoyne. He admired George Barker in much the same way as he admired Kavanagh, and Barker's life provided him with almost as much comic detail as Kavanagh's did... As with painting, he hardly ever spoke of his mother, probably because she was too close...
— 'Why doesn't Tony exhibit?' he asked another time.'He has drawing talent.'
— 'He doesn't seem to want to.'
— 'He has far more talent than most of the people having shows in Dublin...'
...I remember letting it rest, though I thought the line of argument exceeding strange in his case. He had had one exhibition, which was notable for the acclaim it received, and never exhibited again. I felt like asking him why he was urging Tony to exhibit while patently unwilling to exhibit himself, but I knew instinctively that the question would not be welcomed.
He was having his portrait painted by Tim Behrens, and some mornings Katty and I went with him. He complained that he disliked sitting for his portrait, and I asked the obvious, 'Well, why do you do it?'
— 'I suppose if you have to ask other people to sit for you, from time to time you have to do the same yourself.'
...Often Paddy and I went to galleries together... 'You can't write about painting', he asserted. 'The whole thing is tactile. The canvas is either alive or it isn't. You can only look'... Sometimes we would wander through the commercial galleries around Bond Street. He was particularly excited by a small show of Giacometti's sculptures, and he admired LS Lowry. He said then that anybody with enough money to buy a Lowry would make a fortune. It was always a pleasure to look at paintings with him, but I knew that I could never be more than a very lame follower. We talked about this: that I hadn't the vocabulary, how what I liked or disliked was completely haphazard, that I could never feel or see through paint the way I could with words. He argued that it was better to approach painting or sculpture with clear unprejudiced eyes rather than with a mass of opinions or preconceptions... That weakness was depressingly apparent when we went together to the Picasso retrospective... Picasso meant nothing to me. I found the variety of styles and colours dispiriting. I said I'd bow out... I remember saying to him as he rejoined me and we were leaving the gallery, 'I'm afraid I'd give the whole show for one small Guan Gris'. Paddy countered, 'I think it's true that no single painting works by itself in the exhibition, but when you see them together it's breathtaking; it's the variety, the colour, the vitality, the sheer exuberance. There is a certain type of good painter who disappears or is diminished in a big show, and there are others — none more so than Picasso — who need a big show to bring the work to life'...
Often we went to the National Gallery. Usually we split up. I was always sure to find him in the Rembrandt Room. A couple of times when he was pressed for time we went there directly. 'It's all so simple, such magic, so much life and death in one canvas', he said once. When I look at some of the portraits of his mother I am reminded of the portrait of Maria Trapp which he so admired.
Paddy wanted to make a drawing of me to send back as a present to his mother, and started it after lunch the day before I was to return to Dublin. He was having difficulty, and after several starts abandoned it, and we went to see a Disney film which was showing at the Paddington Cinema around the corner. He delighted in the pictures of the deer crossing the Artic wastes along with the train of predators. The next morning he finished the drawing. I packed it with my bags, and we had the whole of the idle day together until the 8:40 left Euston.
We sat for a while by the fountain before crossing to a bar on the Bayswater Road... 'It would be obscene to be anything but a romantic in this conformist age', Paddy asserted, and I disagreed, thinking it was more a matter or temperament and background...
By way of the many beautiful girls that passed along Bayswater Road, the talk turned to Balbec and the sea, to the great passages on memory in St Augustine's Confessions, and finally to the image, how all artistic activity centres on bringing the clean image that moves us out into the light. On that we could agree. We could even order a large gin on the strength of it. Paddy quoted Aquinas: 'The image is a principal of our Knowledge. It is that from which our intellectual activity begins, not as a passing stimulus but as an enduring foundation.' And the 8:40 out of Euston was still hours away.
— John McGahern (novelist and short story writer), 'The Bird Swift', Love Of The World, Edited by Stanley van der Ziel,2009; Patrick Swift (1927-83), Gandon Editions, 1993
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Patrick Swift in London
David Wright (poet)
...If we had one thing in common, it was that we put our vocations first and let our ‘careers’ follow as best they might — not that this attitude was anything but the norm in the strange and, as it now turns out to have been, short-lived society in which we met...
We met on a cold dark evening in the small bar of the Duke of Wellington at the corner of Wardour and Old Compton Street... was then, in the Spring of 1953, the favoured rendezvous of the poets, painters, and odd bods that constituted Soho society; chiefly because it was there that George Barker was to be found when he came up to town. It was in fact George Barker who introduced me... Swift... was seated beside Anthony Cronin, whom I also met for the first time... Swift and Cronin, through their friend Harry Craig, brought me to the attention of the publisher Derek Verschoyle — and this was typical of Swift, who took immense pains to push the product of anybody whose work he believed in, yet never bothered to promote his own.
As in those days the pub society of Soho met nightly or almost nightly, it did not take long to transmute acquaintanceship into friendship. Soon after we met, Swift invited me to sit for my portrait. I found myself travelling two or three mornings a week from my Great Ormond Street flat to Camden Town, where Swift had a studio, and where Cronin was temporarily lodging. I knew nothing about painting. I didn’t even know what I liked, but Swift’s precise images of trees, foliage, faces and figures disturbed me then, whereas they delight me now...
Some months — or it may have been a year — after our first meeting, Swift was given a travelling grant of £500 from the Cultural Relations Committee of the Irish Department of External Affairs to study painting in Europe... it was Cronin who entered Paddy’s name for him when Paddy was abroad...
Meanwhile, I had got involved, first as an adviser, then as an associate, and finally as co-editor, with a magazine called Nimbus... it was through Swift that what one might term my greatest scoop was achieved. Swift was back in Ireland, and from there posted me a thick bound volume of typescript poems with no author's name on them nor any explanation of their provenance. But it didn’t take me more than two minutes to realise that these were unpublished poems by the legendary Patrick Kavanagh — I say legendary because though no English literary magazine had the nous to print his work in those days, his was a name to conjure with among the denizens of Soho... Nimbus printed nineteen of them in a single issue. This was seen by the then poetry reader for Longmans, Thomas Blackburn, and led to the publication of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling in 1960, and to Kavanagh’s subsequent, if long-delayed, fame.
Not that fame mattered much to Swift: the work was all, at least as far as he himself was concerned. After his first, acclaimed, exhibition in Dublin — before I knew him — he decided that celebrity was a nuisance, a distraction… 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...
I received a letter from Swift inviting me to come in with him to edit a new quarterly magazine...
Eventually, after many months, Ms Hutchinson succeeded in finding a backer for the magazine, who turned out to be a most unlikely patron for the kind of venture that Swift and I projected. He was Michael Berry, now Lord Hartwell, the owner of the Daily Telegraph.
He undertook to back the first four numbers of X (as the magazine was called, after the mathematical symbol for the unknown quantity), and proved to be an ideal backer — he never interfered... Swift of course was responsible for the art side of the magazine: he designed the striking format (the size of the page was in fact determined by the dimensions of a menu-card in a caff behind Victoria Station where we happened to be having a cup of coffee). Those were the boom years of abstract art... he promoted the work of then little known figurative painters, among them the young Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Aitchison, and such artists – as yet uncannonised — as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and the forgotten David Bomberg, to say nothing of the continentals like Kokoschka, Giacometti, André Masson. Examples of their work were reproduced, and, more importantly, it was Swift’s idea that the artists should speak for themselves, which was achieved either by transcribing their recorded conversation (not ‘interviews’) or by publishing their notebooks. Swift’s unearthing and editing of David Bomberg’s outspoken and apocalyptic pensées scattered about his miscellaneous papers, was an outstanding contribution.
Nor was he any less active on the literary side of the magazine. Here Swift and I worked in perfect harmony...
X survived for two years and ended with its seventh number. Its circulation was never much more than 3,000, I believe, but its influence was considerable... After our first year, Michael Berry generously agreed to back a further two numbers. The seventh, and final, number was paid for by the sale of author’s manuscripts from the six previous issues. If Swift and I did not try very hard to find a new backer, it was not because we felt the job we had set out to do was wholly accomplished, but because neither of us could stand much more of the stresses and pressures to which were subjected. Mary Hutchinson, without whom the magazine would never have come into being, proved to be our old lady at the sea. She was forever ringing one or other of us up with notions for the magazine… out of which she had to be politely argued — an exercise that, I do not exaggerate, often occupied us for several hours a day... In the end, Swift had to give up answering his telephone...
Not long before the appearance of the last number of X, Patrick, his wife Oonagh and their two children left England for Portugal… But this was not the end of our collaboration. A few months after Swift had settled in the then remote and primitive fishing-village of Carvoeiro in Algarve, I went to stay with him; which visit engendered the idea of our writing a book, to be illustrated with his line drawings, about that then unknown corner of Portugal. The success of this book — essentially a portrait of the old Algarve before tourism and progress had a chance to dilute its individuality — led to our being commissioned to write another, this time about Minho and the north of Portugal. A third book, to do with Lisbon and the Alentejo, completed our survey of the country. In these books are recorded, by one or the other of us, all my later adventures with Swift, whom I can only call the most remarkable man I have ever known.
— David Wright, Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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Lima de Freitas (artist, writer)
The following text was written in 1974 for the catalogue of Patrick Swift’s exhibition at the S. Mamede Gallery in Lisbon
In a beautifully perceptive essay which Patrick Swift contributed to Homage to George Barker... he put forward certain ideas which I think are worth recalling...
Patrick Swift refers to St Augustine's view of the human personality, whose essence is the divine word (Logos). From this springs all artistic expression. It provides the touchstone for judging the validity (or not, as the case may be) of all forms of thought and expression, poetic and creative, within whose core lies the Mystery. Patrick Swift writes:
It is his comments on the metaphysics of Aristotle that the sentence of Aquinas occurs: The philosopher is related to the poet in that both are concerned with mirandum. This strikes me as a serious remark and one relevant to the moment. For confessional disclosures about aspects of the individual psychology do not constitute a considerable substitute for the mirandum of which Saint Thomas Aquinas speaks. There is the Mystery, and it will always be the important part of the poet's function to acknowledge it; and unless science can explain origins (and not merely origin of species but the origin of our existence and its purpose) it will remain unsatisfying to the serious mind.
Evaluation is not a function of reason: reason deals with accepted facts, including accepted values. Ignorance of this is the root of rational philistinism.
This is the very heart of the problem of artistic communication. As Samuel Beckett says: '... the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication. Even on the rare occasions when word and gesture happen to be valid expressions of the personality, they lose their significance on their passage through the cataract of the personality that is opposed to them. Either we speak and act for ourselves in which case speech and action are distorted and emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is not ours or else we speak and act for others — in which case we speak and act a lie.'
'What then is the answer to this condition?', asks Patrick Swift. For the poet Ezra Pound's explanation or statement of how the poem gets written explains his immediate relationship to the Dilemma: 'They were made for no man's entertainment but because a man believing in silence found himself unable to withhold from speaking.' Or from painting, I would add.
These thoughts of Patrick Swift seem to me essential to an understanding of the personality and work of this Irish artist, whose works are now on show in Lisbon for the first time.
Having had a long and warm friendship with Patrick Swift, I regard it as a very great privilege to present this exhibition of his works. They are the product of his years in the Algarve, where he has lived since 1962, in a whitewashed house built by himself among fig trees, overlooking the sea. He jealously guards his privacy and simple way of life, though never selfishly and always with generosity to his family and friends. No one who visits his studio (guided by a kerosene lamp) can doubt that he is a very special person.
Yet what sort of man is he, this friendly, hospitable Celt who has deliberately chosen to live in an isolated corner of Portugal, where the clear night sky sparkles with constellations never seen by city eyes? Is he simply an unaffected original, a fugitive from hectic metropolitan life, candidly retreating into the trees he so loves to paint in his deceptively naïve, timeless style? Or is he little more than an eccentric balladeer, nostalgically singing in the evening light of sufferings and mysteries of a very old legendary country? Patrick Swift speaks little about his past... What I know of him I have pieced together from revelations in unguarded moments and from hints and allusions over many years of friendship and collaboration. The picture which has thus emerged is surprising and unexpected. I have come to realise that he possesses an extraordinary knowledge of painting, poetry and philosophy, that his thought is unusually penetrating and profound, his writing lucid and his cultural appreciation remarkably wide-ranging. But there is more than this. Gradually I have become convinced that Patrick Swift has a right to be regarded as a major artistic figure in post-war Europe. Not only is he a distinguished painter, but he was also one of the founders, with David Wright, of perhaps the foremost literary and artistic review of the post-war years. In X... one can find original articles by such artists as Alberto Giacometti, Auberjonois, David Bomberg, Andre Masson, Oskar Kokoschka, poems by Ezra Pound, Jules Supervielle, Milosz, Kavanagh... essays by Ghika, René Daumal, Samuel Beckett...
It is perhaps difficult, at first, to reconcile the image of the solitary Irishman in his Algarve retreat with that of the driving force of a review which was so amazingly international and which played such a central role in the cultural milieu of the early 1960’s. Yet the evidence is indisputable...
The explanation is not easy. What is certain is that Patrick Swift has a deep dislike of cultural fashions... What he sought was solitude.(‘The temple is holy’ — proclaimed Ezra pound — ‘because it is not for sale’) The solitude he sought is that described by Beckett, where there is space and time to nurture that tender, vulnerable plant, the True Self... Such a solitude is in no sense an escape or an easy compromise...
Anyway, Patrick Swift reached the haven of the Algarve coast, the same coast his Celtic forefathers knew so well. Whose eye could better appreciate its natural beauty, its scented hills, the light, sublime, the vibrant vegetation shimmering under the burning sun? 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. There is nothing here of the sentimental, pretentious lyrics, of the typical provincial artist: Patrick Swift’s paintings are an act of praise and wonder.
…Patrick Swift painted these trees after his time in London and Paris… His painting, whether one is attracted to it or not, has to be seen with hindsight. It can only be appreciated after fully taking in what has been the European experience of recent times.
Who these days pays attention to the clamorous making and breaking of reputations and the compiling of artistic league tables? To paraphrase Robert Graves, there is a simple response to those who insist that there is a ‘correct’ way of painting: if a painting is Art, then it is of no interest...
The natural world he is striving to put on his canvases has no resemblance to the preconceived clichés of weary, blinkered city dwellers out for a tranquillising weekend in the countryside. Patrick Swift saw something different: a natural world both vaster and more intimate, a world lying almost dormant in the deepest recesses of the unconscious, at a level where man's primeval dreams and motivations are born. It is that great divide, separating our natural from our civilised selves, where 'animus' and 'anima' meet, where the mystery of reintegration will, if it can, occur. Will it in fact ever be possible? Only the solitary man can answer that question today; plunging into the depths, seeking out that tiny nodule of consciousness where a still, forgotten voice says 'I am'. Painting, by breaking the vow of silence, is then the voice of a man who 'cannot withhold from speaking'.
***
The above text was written in 1974 for the catalogue of Patrick Swift's only exhibition in Lisbon, at the S Mamede Gallery. The opening took place just a month before the 'flower revolution' of 25 April. During the following years, Patrick Swift devoted himself to running the traditional pottery he had created in Algarve... Patrick Swift had gone to the Algarve in search of the retreat and solitude he needed to sound, through his painting, his inner self. And he was fortunate, for he had long periods of pure creative peace...
The Portuguese, as is often the case, have not yet fully appreciated what Patrick Swift did for their country. (It is interesting though, that Francisco Sá Carneiro was one of the few who did recognise his work; when he became Prime Minister he commissioned him to paint his portrait.)... but this is also partly due to his personality and style of life. Proud, wise and independent he despised opportunism and was hostile to easy success...
I see him yet, a good and dear friend! I shall always see him as a man of profound dignity, generous and proud, a man ceaselessly questioning and seeking, and sometimes seemingly lost in a contemplation of the infinite mystery of life, far in some remote land of savage beauty.
— Lima de Freitas (Portuguese artist and writer), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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Katherine Swift (artist; Swift's eldest daughter)
...He had a great many friends. People were always coming and going. On several occasions I went to the butcher's with an Indian poet called Dom Moraes from Goa, who cooked kidneys for breakfast when he spent the night. Brian Higgins (a poet from Hull) often slept in the living room, and I was fond of waking him by riding my huge antique tricycle into the front door. He was always good humoured about it. Patrick Kavanagh used to sit in the kitchen and nearly always seemed to stay to lunch or dinner...
I was too small to remember why we left London...
My father was always popular wherever he went, but in Carvoeiro he soon became a local hero... With his musical ear and knowledge of Latin, he was able to speak and read Portuguese almost immediately. He negotiated the rental of a large green house built looking over the rest of the village.
One of the fishermen was a character known as the 'Destroyer' — he had damaged himself in some way by getting the bends when dynamiting and diving for fish... My father painted a series of portraits of him. He was paid to sit, and remained motionless for hours. There was also a walled garden at the back of the house where my father painted the almond trees.
At some stage, not long after we were installed in the green house, my father hired a shed in the countryside, and there painted a very large and magnificent painting of the Algarve in the springtime, when everything is green...
after we moved from the green house to the cottage...
He had no studio as such in the cottage, and would work while our mother took us for walks. It was an awkward arrangement, but he painted some fine landscapes in these conditions nevertheless.
On winter evenings he read poetry to us by the fire. I remember Blake and Wordsworth were great favourites...
Brian Higgins came to stay, but the cottage was tiny and he stayed next door, joining us for meals... My father was always generous, and patient, and never begrudged providing poets with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Higgins spent at least a year with us.
Art materials were hard to come by. In order to get them you had to go to Lisbon to the Rua de Rosa... It must have required all my father's charm and tolerance to negotiate for materials, but he succeeded. He bought oil paint in large tins, bristle brushes and rolls of cotton canvas. The local carpenter made him his stretchers, and he always found someone to help him to stretch his large canvases. When he had to, for want of anything better, he would use paraffin as a medium. Broken glass always served as a palette.
He liked to work in the morning, and was very much a morning person. He was always up early (often at six o'clock) whistling and making breakfast. Ideally he liked to spend three hours painting every morning, and he told me that it was then he did his best work. Any work done after that never quite matched up.
He liked to block in a painting quickly — often in a morning — and then proceed at his leisure. He would often work on the same painting for months. He sometimes left a painting, and then returned to it much later. It was years before some of his paintings were finished, although he painted others in a matter of weeks. He believed that observation was the basis of all good painting, and considered some sort of instruction in drawing, and drawing from life above all, to be essential. At the same time, however, he saw academic training as restraining and destructive to the creative person...
When he was drawing from life at the art school in Dublin, my father liked to use a pen and ink, which kept his drawing as free and spontaneous as possible...
As a young man he painted with a limited palette of black, white (titanium and zinc), raw umber, burnt umber, raw sienna and burnt sienna. He once advised me to try this, which I did, and I found it to be a surprisingly complete palette, excellent for portraiture in particular, and I set quite a trend in the place where I was working at the time...
He had an enormous enthusiasm for painting. He visited museums and galleries whenever he had the opportunity, and often complained about missing so many exhibitions. He was always envious if I happened to see something he wanted to. He admired Titian's late self-portraits, and Rembrandt's intensely. He was full of praise for Velázquez, Pierro della Francesca, Monet, Cézanne, Bonnard, and Kokoschka.
One day my father was talking to me about his plans to paint the almond blossom which bedecks the Algarve so famously in spring. Apparently, he had painted a particularly good painting of almond blossom in his youth, and still regretted having sold it. It had 'just the right amount of pink if you know what I mean'. He told me how Bonnard, when lying on his deathbed, painted an almond tree with the help of a student. Just before he died he said to the student, 'put a little more pink on the blossom'...
When we moved to our big new house... my father had, at last, a studio to work in. It was an octagonal room with windows all around it which remained shuttered most of the time. Here he was able to work on a larger scale than before, and also enjoyed a little more peace. It was then that he began to work on the paintings which were exhibited in Lisbon in 1974.
His work in Portugal became increasingly expressive and he explored the application of the mark with more intensity, applying thick paint — even dollops of it — to a thinly applied ground. His painting became more forceful and energetic, and his colours were extremely honest. The yellows and blues he put on his canvases were really there outside the window. This freedom in his work was quite different to the controlled restraint of his early work.
He nearly always painted portraits of either people or trees. I think he was fascinated by the patterns that branches make and was often painting the spaces between them, treating this subject in an almost abstract way.
— Katherine Swift (artist; Swift's eldest daughter), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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Tim Motion (photographer and jazz musician)
...The year 1963 was a busy one; as well as painting, book-writing and photography, we bought land beyond the lighthouse… We planned houses, drove to England, Dublin, and returned via Rome...
In 1965 Swift held an exhibition of drawings in Lisbon, and I started plans for a ‘music bar’ in Carvoeiro. The latter was all due to an inebriated conversation in Maria da Gloria’s taberna one night — two hours after a remark from Paddy that we needed somewhere to go at night, I found myself the new owner of a crumbling earth-walled building in the middle of the village and £1,000 poorer — money that I didn’t have. Over the next two years I gradually became a nightclub owner. Paddy was always instructive in the design and decoration of these premises...
Paddy meanwhile was installed in his new studio atop the splendid Swift house...
At about the same time he realised a dream of persuading local potters to develope their craft, and enhance their pottery with ancient and traditional designs which had all but died out, designs evocative of Cretan/ Minoan and ‘majolica’ ware. With the boom in tourism this venture became very successful, and with constant technical improvements and training of local people in the painting of ceramics, Porches Pottery became famous...
I think that Swift painted his deepest and certainly most peaceful works during the latter years of the seventies, and he was still producing watercolours while bedridden towards the end of his life.
For myself, a somewhat repressed middle-class lad with romantic notions of life and art, this feigned unseriousness and freedom of expression within a hawk-eyed and committed moral framework was mysterious and liberating. But Paddy Swift was cunningly dismissive of his art: ‘It’s just making marks, dear boy’, he would say, ‘just making marks. A way of passing the time’.
— Tim Motion (photographer and jazz musician; his photographs illustrate Swift’s Algarve - a portrait and a guide and other books on Portugal), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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Jacques D'Arribehaude (French cinéaste and documentary film director)
...When, overwhelmed by the beauty of the Portuguese coast, I tried to capture its splendour with my movie camera, Patrick drew my attention towards the human element, which I was inclined to use merely as distant silhouettes in my films. 'Faces'! he would say to me, 'Look at the faces!' And when he repeated these words to me in the National Museum in Lisbon, as we looked at the famous polyptique of Nuno Gonçalves, the shock I felt revealed to me the full meaning of his words. One has the same kind of magical feeling here as in Lascaux and at Altamira or by the ancient pyramids — that sacred overleaping towards immortality found in medieval illuminated manuscripts and in Byzantine icons. But at the same time, and here is the real surprise, the funeral character of our traditional ancestor worship, lurking always at the back of our dreams, is here abolished by the unbelievable vitality of the faces, which for more than five centuries have looked at and called out to us...
Patrick told me one day that, in his eyes, the word 'happiness' was a meaningless expression and one which he had, long ago, excised from his vocabulary. And yet, for me, it was hard to see him as anything other than the living image and exemplar of the happy man. Yet he spoke truthfully, for like all true artists he was torn and seared by opposing passions. And though he always gave the impression of great humour and a serene temperament, he was inwardly subjected to doubt, melancholy, and the blackest turbulence of the soul... through him I learnt that happiness, like life, is only a dream. And that here on earth the one reality that counts is to shoulder one's destiny with dignity.
We were to meet again, all too briefly, alas, in his beloved Ireland, and in our dear Paris. Then many years seemed to pass in a twinkling. But we kept in touch through friends and letters, and I knew that his wit and talent continued to brighten that corner of the Algarve which he had made his kingdom. He was one of those exceedingly rare men, who, at the first meeting, strike one as unforgettable, and whose emphatic presence, whose look and smile, would follow one to the end of life. How often, when dispirited by some misfortune or non-happening in my life, have I not longed for the comfort of his presence and for his friendly sympathy...
In the studio, our friend the photographer Tim Motion is taking photographs of Patrick's work — strong, expressive portraits of the countryfolk that remind me of our visits to the Lisbon art galleries ('Faces! look at the faces!') — and I notice that, as in the work by Nuno Gonçalves, the sea rarely appears in Swift's paintings, although perhaps one senses its presence, if only in the subtly changing lights where greens and blues melt into one another and one imagines a deep homesickness within the artist. There is that great agonising Irish landscape, in which an old couple seem to be precipitated out of the background, to welcome with unutterable love and tenderness a blond and bouncing child who seems to carry with him all the hopes of this earth...
I feel more than ever the mystery of art as I look at the photographs which Tim has taken of the paintings, in which one sees the anguish of an artist whose soul is about to leave this world. I see it in the last, beautiful, and moving portrait of his friend Sá Carneiro, who also met with a tragic and premature death. Yes, from that first enigmatic portrait of Oonagh, painted with Piero della Francesca's colours in Rome 1954... to the baroque twisting luxuriance of the landscapes (an obsession with roots perhaps) back to the fervent warmth of that final tribute to Sá Carneiro, I judge the path he took, the strength and diversity of his work, so cruelly interrupted at its zenith, in its full glory...
As in the great masters of painting, I notice that his use of cold tonality which at a superficial glance might seem to dominate (green and blue in the landscape) gives instead a strange feeling of warmth, apparently coming from nowhere, but nonetheless incandescent. It is then that the warm colours — the ardent yellows, ochres, burnt siennas — mix subtly with the colder colours which exist behind them. And yet, in the breathtaking flamboyance of the fig trees... one sees all the fire of the entire world, her fabulous strength, her hidden violence. The arborescent roots twist and intertwine in a wild exuberance, the leaves vibrate as though lifted by the torrential bubbling of metal in fusion, and in them one sees all the chaos of torment and night, of disorder, and of genius after a final and exhausting battle triumphant over nature...
And I also think of Bonnard's profound and crucial words: 'What matters is not to paint life, but to make painting alive...'
A gamble that was taken up and won by Patrick Swift, whose paintings reveal how he filled his too brief life and made of it this unhurried, secret, and magnificent apotheosis.
— Jacques D'Arribehaude (French cinéaste and documentary film director), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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Lionel Miskin (painter and ceramicist)
There are artists…and artists: I am not endeared to them as a category. And excellence — that’s so much in doubt, in dispute at the best of times. Personally I have always been intrigued by the rare possibility of the kind of artist who not only paints well, but makes a beautiful small envelope around him that laps over the edges of canvases and whatever else he works on to form an environment in which he and perhaps his family now receive you. But I met him twice only: at the very beginning of his artistic life, and at the end of it.
It may have been 1951, I am not sure when, I was over in Dublin to have a show of my own stuff that someone thought of taking me along to see a young painter everyone was talking about... Well, he meant business alright — that was obvious. That afternoon he seemed, to me, remarkably sure of himself, serious, not given to gratuitous smiles, pretty formidable, a very handsome, clear-eyed man with the faint touch of contempt in his expression that I associated with the men in Manet’s paintings...
But let me describe the house...
If you build your house as you really want it, shape it, decorate it, place it in its environment as he had done, it’s no longer any common or garden house. Its an extension of you — as the territory is around a queen ant. It's an art object, but in spite of Oscar Wilde's canon, a useful one; one...to use... Patrick's house was remarkable... Everything about it was fascinating, surprising, individual... It was my first experience of such a place and I shall never forget it. You need a lot of will, strength and contempt for a certain limitation of professionalism that makes people work only for money and fame, to create such a place for yourself, for your family, and at the same time against a background of painting and running a pottery...
Patrick’s own ceramics were a lesson in many ways — they were in the simplest way figurative and decorative, completely individual, really worked in the medium, and had about them such a breath of life and imagination expressed with a very particular touch and brio... Patrick really released his imagination in his pottery and pressed the medium to its utmost absolutely, not as potters ever do, but painters like Picasso, Chagall...
The great film director Jean Renoir’s biography of his father left me with this feeling, finally, he had rated him even more for the way he lived than for his masterpieces. And it’s not so common among artists. So many are diminished in life as they expand in their work. But it was all of a piece with Patrick: his wife Oonagh, his daughters, the whole set-up… they added up to something. I sensed it as anyone would immediately. After my brief visit I really felt I had been in a very unusual household, in a sense, just in time... And for a long time felt very sad for them all. What’s the use of saying the man could have done so many more excellent things. But that’s how it was — he was at the peak of his powers.
— Lionel Miskin (painter and ceramicist; studied at St Martin’s College), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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Note: many of the reproductions displayed here are of poor quality
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By Swift
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Nano Reid - Some notes on Caravaggio - Italian Report - The Artist Speaks - X magazine - RHA Exhibition 1951 - Eça de Queiroz & Fernando Pessoa - The Portuguese Enigma - Notebooks - All
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About Swift
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Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal - IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue - Dublin 1950-2 - By His Friends - X magazine - Poems - Further Quotes About - All
By His Friends
Anthony Cronin - John Ryan - John Jordan - C.H.Sisson - Martin Green - John McGahern - David Wright - Lima de Freitas - Katherine Swift - Tim Motion - Lionel Miskin - Jacques D'Arribehaude - Brian Higgins - George Barker - Patrick Kavanagh
Further Quotes
Brian Fallon - Aidan Dunne - Derek Hill - Brendan Behan - Lucian Freud - Patrick Kavanagh - Elizabeth Smart - Further Quotes About
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