Patrick Swift Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activity… a picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas... A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it will never happen again and in this sense is an impossible object... And it is something which happens in life not in art: a picture which was merely the product of art would not be very interesting and could tell us nothing we were not already aware of. The old saying, what you don't know can't hurt you, expresses the opposite idea to that which animates the painter before his canvas. It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.

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

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

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

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

Patrick Swift
There are ambiguities in the art of painting but they are the ambiguities of a fine precision: the discovered fact of the image containing at the same time the reverberations of the unknown, the truly mysterious… I would take this further and add that painting is itself precise in its ideas. In the sense that the image is the idea in its purist form.

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
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
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
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
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
Everything written about art is profoundly unimportant.

Patrick Swift
Metaphysics — what metaphysics do those trees have?

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

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
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
In the end each man experiences only himself. To refer to your neighbour or twenty million of them for your touchstone of reality is a logical nonsense in the life of the individual person. When one reflects on the personality of Lautrec in these pictures, brave, unconcerned, scornful, and violent, it becomes a monstrosity of sophism to consider his size or shape as relevant factors. 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
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
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
No real painter ever wants be known through any other medium than his painting.

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

Patrick Swift
Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape. Picture-making is ludicrous in the light of the awful times we must endure. It is sufficient to contemplate the nature of composition to see that the picture itself is impossible. Each square inch of Titian contains the whole pointless — between the cradle and the grave. My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.

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
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
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
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.
Mob Morals and the Art of Loving Art

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