Patrick Swift quotes

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)
The development that produces great art is a moral and not an aesthetic development. View quote
Patrick Swift
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
Its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown. View quote
Patrick Swift
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
Obey God by living spontaneously. View quote
Patrick Swift
To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do. View quote
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 the painter, for whom painting is a vital activity and a way of life - not merely a profession - such attitudes as we find in the histories are deadly. For him the only benefit, at least the deepest and most important benefit, which he can get from the study of the Masters comes from his capacity to see the painting in a thoroughly contemporary way. I mean in the present tense - the tense after all in which it was painted. Not for instance as an early this or a late that, nor as a good example of chiaroscuro or some other aesthetic or technical quality but as an immediately important human statement completely relevant to his life at the moment and convincing for that reason. If a work does not strike the painter in this way all further analysis of it will be futile. View quote
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
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). View quote
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
But of course these pictures are not shocking; good painting never is. View quote
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
You may know a good painter by his habit of work: a good painter works constantly. View quote
Patrick Swift
Painting is created from within and we must begin from within if we are to understand it. View quote
Patrick Swift
Its purpose is moral, that is, the evaluation of experience; in the deepest sense, the development of taste. (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. View quote
Patrick Swift
To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration. View quote
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. View quote
Patrick Swift
Everything written about art is profoundly unimportant. View quote
Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift - Image
Occupation: Irish Painter
Born: August 12, 1927
Died: July 19, 1983
Quotes count: 41
Wikipedia: Patrick Swift

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