Patrick Swift

I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension — tension is the only word for it — can be painted.

— Patrick Swift

The development that produces great art is a moral and not an aesthetic development.

— Patrick Swift

Its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown.

— Patrick Swift

All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity.

— Patrick Swift

One who opens his eyes and sees. To be good at seeing. How difficult not to see anything but the visible. And nothing will be left but dust and manure. Attempting the impossible. Approach the mystery.

— Patrick Swift

Metaphysics — what metaphysics do those trees have?

— Patrick Swift

For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.

— Patrick Swift

Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.

— Patrick Swift

The painter celebrates life where he finds it. His morality is the morality of enjoyment, of the continuous development of his own taste without shame or fear. It is a sort of heroism.

— Patrick Swift

In so far as it is concerned with truth that goes beyond appearance and form, art is transcendental. The consciousness of this is often a snare for the painter who is led by a false preoccupation with some literary or intellectual conception of reality into a time-conscious literary form. Nano Reid realised with the instinct of a painter that for her the whole truth existed in the head, the body, the structure of life: it lay there revealed in the form, the line, a timeless and profound reality.

— Patrick Swift

Nano Reid does not begin a portrait with any ideas about the person she draws. She is concerned with the head, its existence as a structure with certain characteristics. She is so much concerned with this that her portraits are inevitably deep studies of character and personality. The head, the face, the lines and features, contain everything for the painter who understands well enough to put it down.

— Patrick Swift

New knowledge is only useful in so far as it opens up new vistas for the imagination, and no more so than the old forms which the artist must understand only in order to reject.

— Patrick Swift

No real painter ever wants be known through any other medium than his painting.

— Patrick Swift

Technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in terms of spondees and trochees; why must the painter daily suffer the indignity? Any picture which makes one conscious first of its technical qualities, good or bad, is not a good picture, whatever else it may be.

— Patrick Swift

Everything written about art is profoundly unimportant.

— Patrick Swift

Good painting is not produced by any unintelligent following of inspiration or temperament.

— Patrick Swift

The only indication of an individual vision is an individual style: "What I seek above all in a picture is a man and not a picture" – Zola

— Patrick Swift

You may know a good painter by his habit of work: a good painter works constantly.

— Patrick Swift

It is by deciding what is real for him and portraying it convincingly that the painter serves the true ends of art. The question of “social” reality does not arise on this profoundly personal level. On the other hand the question of personal salvation and our relationship to God does. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.

— Patrick Swift

Painting is created from within and we must begin from within if we are to understand it.

— Patrick Swift

I do not know if there are in fact such things as definable social standards of aesthetics that would have any historical or artistic value, but whether there are or not it seems clear to me that for the painter nothing less than complete personal involvement of a moral nature will do.

— Patrick Swift

For even the painter himself cannot be fully aware of the way in which the picture gets made: there is a wide area of the unpredictable in the act of pushing paint about in the definition of an image.

— Patrick Swift

The interesting thing is what happens in the specific picture: its precision in terms of the sensations it produces — the illusion it creates and the effect of this illusion on the psychology opposed to it. General philosophical and technical information however interesting in itself is secondary to this reality.

— Patrick Swift

For the notion of progress in the arts, (either spiritually or artistically) has been discredited by many respectable intellects (Kierkegaard and Baudelaire above all, both of whom encountered the idea when it first reared itself in its present form in Europe).

— Patrick Swift

It is noticeable that rejection and selection no longer operate in terms of merely quality but on kind. This is exactly the situation confronting the Impressionists who attempted to show their works in the salon of 1865.

— Patrick Swift

It is not necessary to subscribe to the tiresome conception of the artist as rampaging Bohemian to understand that the activity of painting is socially useless, or at best occupies a dubious position...In the remote purity of his solitariness, where the work of art is made, the artist is supremely the anti-social creature.

— Patrick Swift

There is a sense, and a very exciting sense, in which art is moral. When Stendhal says a good picture is nothing but a construction in ethics, one recognises a truth about art which opens up vistas that are at the same time liberating and terrifying. The ethics of art are terrifying because real art by increasing our knowledge of ourselves increases in exactly the same proportion the ethical commitment.

— Patrick Swift

The techniques for making art thus morally acceptable, of drawing its fangs, are endless; and each generation finds its own. Just now the democratic machinery for rendering art safe is so efficient that it seems that the system can absorb anything. It would be exciting to think that somewhere in Europe there was a man making art which was so violent and true that the system could not take it.

— Patrick Swift

His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations.

— Patrick Swift

But of course these pictures are not shocking; good painting never is.

— Patrick Swift

They verge on the realm of the confession- hovering on that vital line between the simply revelatory and consequently vulgar, and the honest statement that is moral and consequently dignified.

— Patrick Swift

Perhaps this is the great weakness of all criticism, that it tends to take facts derived from the examination of unimportant works and applies them in making a judgement about a man whose whole importance rests in the successful work, where these facts do not exist.

— Patrick Swift

All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity... The eroticism of Caravaggio is special because it exists in that area between the simple sensual appreciation of the object which produces the desire to posses it, and the passionate but detached concern of the Observer, which also seeks to posses but to posses through understanding.

— Patrick Swift

Its purpose is moral, that is, the evaluation of experience; in the deepest sense, the development of taste.

— Patrick Swift

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.

— Patrick Swift

To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.

— Patrick Swift

To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.

— Patrick Swift

One who opens his eyes and sees. To be good at seeing. How difficult not to see anything but the visible. And nothing will be left but dust and manure. Attempting the impossible. Approach the mystery.

— Patrick Swift

Metaphysics —\xa0what metaphysics do those trees have?

— Patrick Swift

What trace of the creature subsists in the work. It is a way of staying alone, passing the time subjected to the object — silent, still. Walk with humility in the landscape. To be some natural thing — an ancient tree — no thinking — not to think is central to the activity.

— Patrick Swift

There is the modern phenomenon of the artist declaring all is void, nothing is possible, and soon is making his fortune out of despair and emptiness. I am too romantic to accept the dishonesty inherent in such a role, or perhaps it is my religious education. Such a position cannot be a religious position. (I) do not accept that the artist should not engage in other activities though when he does he must accept a different responsibility.

— Patrick Swift

Life is more important than art — quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.

— Patrick Swift

Obey God by living spontaneously.

— Patrick Swift