Tim Motion
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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 develop 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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Images
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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
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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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