---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Katherine Swift (artist; Swift's eldest daughter)
...He had a great many friends. People were always coming and going. On several occasions I went to the butcher's with an Indian poet called Dom Moraes from Goa, who cooked kidneys for breakfast when he spent the night. Brian Higgins (a poet from Hull) often slept in the living room, and I was fond of waking him by riding my huge antique tricycle into the front door. He was always good humoured about it. Patrick Kavanagh used to sit in the kitchen and nearly always seemed to stay to lunch or dinner...
I was too small to remember why we left London...
My father was always popular wherever he went, but in Carvoeiro he soon became a local hero... With his musical ear and knowledge of Latin, he was able to speak and read Portuguese almost immediately. He negotiated the rental of a large green house built looking over the rest of the village.
One of the fishermen was a character known as the 'Destroyer' — he had damaged himself in some way by getting the bends when dynamiting and diving for fish... My father painted a series of portraits of him. He was paid to sit, and remained motionless for hours. There was also a walled garden at the back of the house where my father painted the almond trees.
At some stage, not long after we were installed in the green house, my father hired a shed in the countryside, and there painted a very large and magnificent painting of the Algarve in the springtime, when everything is green...
after we moved from the green house to the cottage...
He had no studio as such in the cottage, and would work while our mother took us for walks. It was an awkward arrangement, but he painted some fine landscapes in these conditions nevertheless.
On winter evenings he read poetry to us by the fire. I remember Blake and Wordsworth were great favourites...
Brian Higgins came to stay, but the cottage was tiny and he stayed next door, joining us for meals... My father was always generous, and patient, and never begrudged providing poets with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Higgins spent at least a year with us.
Art materials were hard to come by. In order to get them you had to go to Lisbon to the Rua de Rosa... It must have required all my father's charm and tolerance to negotiate for materials, but he succeeded. He bought oil paint in large tins, bristle brushes and rolls of cotton canvas. The local carpenter made him his stretchers, and he always found someone to help him to stretch his large canvases. When he had to, for want of anything better, he would use paraffin as a medium. Broken glass always served as a palette.
He liked to work in the morning, and was very much a morning person. He was always up early (often at six o'clock) whistling and making breakfast. Ideally he liked to spend three hours painting every morning, and he told me that it was then he did his best work. Any work done after that never quite matched up.
He liked to block in a painting quickly — often in a morning — and then proceed at his leisure. He would often work on the same painting for months. He sometimes left a painting, and then returned to it much later. It was years before some of his paintings were finished, although he painted others in a matter of weeks. He believed that observation was the basis of all good painting, and considered some sort of instruction in drawing, and drawing from life above all, to be essential. At the same time, however, he saw academic training as restraining and destructive to the creative person...
When he was drawing from life at the art school in Dublin, my father liked to use a pen and ink, which kept his drawing as free and spontaneous as possible...
As a young man he painted with a limited palette of black, white (titanium and zinc), raw umber, burnt umber, raw sienna and burnt sienna. He once advised me to try this, which I did, and I found it to be a surprisingly complete palette, excellent for portraiture in particular, and I set quite a trend in the place where I was working at the time...
He had an enormous enthusiasm for painting. He visited museums and galleries whenever he had the opportunity, and often complained about missing so many exhibitions. He was always envious if I happened to see something he wanted to. He admired Titian's late self-portraits, and Rembrandt's intensely. He was full of praise for Velázquez, Pierro della Francesca, Monet, Cézanne, Bonnard, and Kokoschka.
One day my father was talking to me about his plans to paint the almond blossom which bedecks the Algarve so famously in spring. Apparently, he had painted a particularly good painting of almond blossom in his youth, and still regretted having sold it. It had 'just the right amount of pink if you know what I mean'. He told me how Bonnard, when lying on his deathbed, painted an almond tree with the help of a student. Just before he died he said to the student, 'put a little more pink on the blossom'...
When we moved to our big new house... my father had, at last, a studio to work in. It was an octagonal room with windows all around it which remained shuttered most of the time. Here he was able to work on a larger scale than before, and also enjoyed a little more peace. It was then that he began to work on the paintings which were exhibited in Lisbon in 1974.
His work in Portugal became increasingly expressive and he explored the application of the mark with more intensity, applying thick paint — even dollops of it — to a thinly applied ground. His painting became more forceful and energetic, and his colours were extremely honest. The yellows and blues he put on his canvases were really there outside the window. This freedom in his work was quite different to the controlled restraint of his early work.
He nearly always painted portraits of either people or trees. I think he was fascinated by the patterns that branches make and was often painting the spaces between them, treating this subject in an almost abstract way.
— Katherine Swift (artist; Swift's eldest daughter),Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOME
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Images
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Swift
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About Swift
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOME
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
