---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
....................................................................
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. He is as clear in his meaning as his painterly technique is pellucid in style.
— John Ryan, Rosc Catalogue, 1971
....................................................................
Patrick Swift
An Introductory Note.
By John Ryan
(Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, July 1951)
This introduction is the last of a series which attempted to evaluate the position of contemporary painting in Ireland. The fact that all the artists included were of the younger generation is not so surprising when we consider that no painting of any worth (excepting that of Yeats) was produced in this country prior to the last war. Patrick Swift, whose work is here reproduced, is our youngest and, many will agree, our most promising professional painter.
Two years ago he had never exhibited a painting and was virtually unknown. His first contact with the public was established when the Irish Exhibition of Living Art accepted four of his paintings for their annual show last summer. The reaction to his work was spontaneous and enthusiastic. This, therefore, would seem to be the time to congratulate him and wish him the success that his work undoubtedly merits — at the start of his career, rather than when his struggle is over and patronage is of the sort that Johnson so indignantly flung back in the face of Lord Chesterfield.
The reproductions give an inadequate impression of the paintings themselves but should serve as a key to the composition and as an indication of the artist's ability to draw with strength and feeling. His subject matter is uncomplicated and might be classified under the headings of portraits and plants. To each he gives the same intensity of observation. No clichés are employed to simplify his task and no tricks are superimposed to foster an illusion of originality. Like every good artist, his originality derives from the intensity of his own vision and the honesty with which he expresses it. 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.
The appearance of Swift on the Irish scene is refreshing and should stimulate his contemporaries and those of us who were beginning to despair of anything new happening in his particular field. The minor revolution which took place in Irish painting (circa 1945) and the consequent improvement in public taste (for which we must thank Mr. Victor Waddington), did a great deal to further the cause of creativity in art. It is now no longer considered a public effrontery not to paint muddy pastiche of the Orpen-Lavery School. Yet this "revolution" has fallen somewhat short of completion (resembling to that extent the stunted growth of our political one) and might easily back-slide into the very complacency from which it rebelled. The fault with our younger painters is that they tend to rely too heavily on the techniques, once valid no doubt, which they acquired in their early years and which gave to their work at the time, the quality upon which their reputations were subsequently built. Nothing leads to imaginative sterility so quickly as this sort of sloth. It is, therefore, of importance to note that Swift's paintings, though strikingly original, are quite free of those charming little tricks, which when overworked, can so easily develop into the monsters of facile repetition which mar so much of what might have been worth while work.
Cyril Connolly once remarked that "Art is man's noblest attempt to preserve Imagination from Time." Even at this early, perhaps formative, stage in his life, the paintings of Patrick Swift strongly suggest the presence of that all-important durability.
— 'Patrick Swift', by John Ryan, Envoy - A Review of Literature and Art, July 1951, vol 5/20
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOME
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Images
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dublin Oil - Dublin Watercolour/ Ink - Italy - Oakridge/ Ashwell Watercolour - Oakridge/ Ashwell Oil - London Oil - London Watercolour/ Ink - France - Algarve Oil - Algarve Watercolour/ Ink - Self-Portraits - Trees - Portraits I - Portraits II - Porches Pottery - Books - Misc - Algarve Studio
Note: many of the reproductions displayed here are of poor quality
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Swift
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About Swift
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Main
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOME
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
