Patrick Swift Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

View all Patrick Swift Quotes
To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.

Patrick Swift
Metaphysics — what metaphysics do those trees have?

Patrick Swift
Everything written about art is profoundly unimportant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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