Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) was an Irish painter who worked in Dublin, London and the Algarve, Portugal.

In Dublin he formed part of the Envoy arts review / McDaid's pub circle of artistic and literary figures.

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.

In the late 1940s he had a studio on Baggot Street, and from 1950 to 1952 he set up his studio on Hatch Street.

Lucian Freud would share Swift's studio when he visited Dublin.

Although a self-taught artist he did attend night classes at the National College of Art in 1946 & 48 (under Sean Keating), freelanced in London in the late 1940s and attended the Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he met Giacometti, in the summer of 1950.

He first exhibited professionally in group shows at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1950 & 51 where his work was singled out by critics.

The Dublin Magazine commented on Swift's "uncompromising clarity of vision which eschews the accidental or the obvious or the sentimental" and "shows his power to convey the full impact of the object, as though the spectator were experiencing it for the first time."

By 1950, Paddy was in Paris... Nights, he went to the galleries, and there he found what he wanted to do.

This tension — tension is the only word for it — can be painted.'" This may have been Swift's only interview. A motif of his work at this time was his bird imagery, which appear to have symbolic overtones, and may have even been a subtle form of self-portraiture. From early on he was involved with literary magazines, such as The Bell and Envoy, contributing the occasional critical piece on art and artists he admired (e.g.Nano Reid, who painted Swift's portrait in 1950). He formed part of the group of artists and writers who were involved with Envoy. Dublin portraits include Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, John Jordan, Patrick Pye, and Julia O'Faolain. During this period he also got to know the likes of Samuel Beckett (possibly one portrait ) and Edward McGuire.

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.

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.

Swift regarded painting as "a deeply personal and private activity".

(In 1952 The Irish Times noted that Swift's work was “intensely personal and strangely disturbing”. )

He was educated at Synge Street CBS, a Christian Brothers School in Dublin.

In 1952 he held his first solo exhibition at the Waddington Galleries.

Time magazine:

"Irish critics got a look at the work of a tousled young (25) man named Paddy Swift and tossed their caps in the air. Paddy's 30 canvases are as grey and gloomy as Dublin itself — harshly realistic paintings of dead birds and rabbits, frightened-looking girls and twisted potted plants. Their fascination is in the Merciless, sharply etched details, as oppressive and inquiring as a back-room third degree. Dublin Understands. Wrote Critic Tony Gray in the Irish Times: Swift 'unearths [from his subjects] not a story, nor a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence.' Said the Irish Press: 'An almost embarrassing candor... Here is a painter who seems to have gone back to the older tradition and to have given the most searching consideration to the composition of his painting.' Dublin, which likes authors who write with a shillelagh, understood an artist who painted with one.

The Word Is Tension.

His work comprises portraits, "tree portraits" (trees held a special fascination for Swift John 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.

In 1993 the Irish Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of Swift's work.

He was a figurative painter.

(Aidan Dunne: "He was a representational artist through and through...Fidelity to visual experience above all." ) 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.

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."

Although he commented on art Swift never affiliated with any official or quasi-official art group or "style".

He had three distinct "periods": Dublin, London, and Algarve.

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.

He liked such old French masters as the 17th century's Nicolas Poussin, the 19th century's Eugène Delacroix, such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti and Britain's Francis Bacon.

The much-admired decorative style of the Matisses is not for Paddy Swift.

'Art,' he thinks, 'is obviously capable of expressing something more closely related to life than these elegant designs.' His main idea is to suggest the tensions he finds in life.

'I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it.