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Jacques D'Arribehaude (French cinéaste and documentary film director)
...When, overwhelmed by the beauty of the Portuguese coast, I tried to capture its splendour with my movie camera, Patrick drew my attention towards the human element, which I was inclined to use merely as distant silhouettes in my films. 'Faces!' he would say to me, 'Look at the faces!' And when he repeated these words to me in the National Museum in Lisbon, as we looked at the famous polyptique of Nuno Gonçalves, the shock I felt revealed to me the full meaning of his words. One has the same kind of magical feeling here as in Lascaux and at Altamira or by the ancient pyramids — that sacred overleaping towards immortality found in medieval illuminated manuscripts and in Byzantine icons. But at the same time, and here is the real surprise, the funeral character of our traditional ancestor worship, lurking always at the back of our dreams, is here abolished by the unbelievable vitality of the faces, which for more than five centuries have looked at and called out to us...
Patrick told me one day that, in his eyes, the word 'happiness' was a meaningless expression and one which he had, long ago, excised from his vocabulary. And yet, for me, it was hard to see him as anything other than the living image and exemplar of the happy man. Yet he spoke truthfully, for like all true artists he was torn and seared by opposing passions. And though he always gave the impression of great humour and a serene temperament, he was inwardly subjected to doubt, melancholy, and the blackest turbulence of the soul... through him I learnt that happiness, like life, is only a dream. And that here on earth the one reality that counts is to shoulder one's destiny with dignity.
We were to meet again, all too briefly, alas, in his beloved Ireland, and in our dear Paris. Then many years seemed to pass in a twinkling. But we kept in touch through friends and letters, and I knew that his wit and talent continued to brighten that corner of the Algarve which he had made his kingdom. He was one of those exceedingly rare men, who, at the first meeting, strike one as unforgettable, and whose emphatic presence, whose look and smile, would follow one to the end of life. How often, when dispirited by some misfortune or non-happening in my life, have I not longed for the comfort of his presence and for his friendly sympathy...
In the studio, our friend the photographer Tim Motion is taking photographs of Patrick's work — strong, expressive portraits of the countryfolk that remind me of our visits to the Lisbon art galleries ('Faces! look at the faces!') — and I notice that, as in the work by Nuno Gonçalves, the sea rarely appears in Swift's paintings, although perhaps one senses its presence, if only in the subtly changing lights where greens and blues melt into one another and one imagines a deep homesickness within the artist. There is that great agonising Irish landscape, in which an old couple seem to be precipitated out of the background, to welcome with unutterable love and tenderness a blond and bouncing child who seems to carry with him all the hopes of this earth...
I feel more than ever the mystery of art as I look at the photographs which Tim has taken of the paintings, in which one sees the anguish of an artist whose soul is about to leave this world. I see it in the last, beautiful, and moving portrait of his friend Sá Carneiro, who also met with a tragic and premature death. Yes, from that first enigmatic portrait of Oonagh, painted with Piero della Francesca's colours in Rome 1954... to the baroque twisting luxuriance of the landscapes (an obsession with roots perhaps) back to the fervent warmth of that final tribute to Sá Carneiro, I judge the path he took, the strength and diversity of his work, so cruelly interrupted at its zenith, in its full glory...
As in the great masters of painting, I notice that his use of cold tonality which at a superficial glance might seem to dominate (green and blue in the landscape) gives instead a strange feeling of warmth, apparently coming from nowhere, but nonetheless incandescent. It is then that the warm colours — the ardent yellows, ochres, burnt siennas — mix subtly with the colder colours which exist behind them. And yet, in the breathtaking flamboyance of the fig trees... one sees all the fire of the entire world, her fabulous strength, her hidden violence. The arborescent roots twist and intertwine in a wild exuberance, the leaves vibrate as though lifted by the torrential bubbling of metal in fusion, and in them one sees all the chaos of torment and night, of disorder, and of genius after a final and exhausting battle triumphant over nature...
And I also think of Bonnard's profound and crucial words: 'What matters is not to paint life, but to make painting alive...'
A gamble that was taken up and won by Patrick Swift, whose paintings reveal how he filled his too brief life and made of it this unhurried, secret, and magnificent apotheosis.
— Jacques D'Arribehaude (French cinéaste and documentary film director), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
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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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