C.H. Sisson
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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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For Patrick Swift
C.H. Sisson
The dishes are untouched
And yet I see them all
Spread out under the moon.
Quiet which nothing spoils,
Not even appetite,
Hung on the point of wish.
Milk-white, with ruddy fruit
Only the angry heart
Is mean enough to ask.
Ice in the silver night
With the bird voices held
In silver cups, tonight.
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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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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
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