Patrick Swift
| Patrick Swift | |
|---|---|
Patrick Swift, Algarve studio, 1978
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| Born |
12 August 1927 Dublin, Ireland |
| Died | 19 July 1983 (aged 55) Algarve, Portugal |
| Resting place | Igreja Matriz (Porches) |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Known for | Painting, ceramics, criticism, poetry, literature |
| Website | http://painterpatrickswift.blogspot.com/ |
Patrick Swift (1927–1983) was an Irish painter who worked in Dublin, London and Algarve in southern 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. 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. 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."
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