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Patrick Swift -
Painter
Quotes
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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
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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
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Any
painter
who thinks he has something to say to the people, or anything to contribute to the world of ideas or literature, is treading dangerous ground; the influence of literature on painting is at all times dangerous if not deadly. Painting is a visual art; and the job of the artist must be to create in visual terms the tension experienced. One cannot argue or explain in paint. The aim is not to put in everything that will help, but as little as one can help, so that a picture is in one sense a sum of destructions. It is a question of honesty and courage: One produces only the necessary — Degas
Patrick Swift
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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).
Official Art and the Modern
Painter
Patrick Swift
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No real
painter
ever wants be known through any other medium than his painting.
Patrick Swift
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You may know a good
painter
by his habit of work: a good
painter
works constantly.
Patrick Swift
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Quote of the day
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Patrick Swift
Born:
August 12, 1927
Died:
July 19, 1983
(aged 55)
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