Monday, Oct. 20, 1952
Life with a Shillelagh
Ireland is famous for its politics, barley whisky and angry authors, but it rarely has much to cheer about in the way of painters. A fortnight ago in Dublin, Irish critics got a look at the work of a touseled young (25) man named Paddy Swift* and tossed their caps in the air. Paddy's 30 canvases are as grey and gloomy as Dublin itself--harshly realistic paintings of dead birds and rabbits, frightened-looking girls and twisted potted plants. Their fascination is in the merciless, sharply etched details, as oppressive and inquiring as a back-room third degree.
Dublin Understands. Wrote Critic Tony Gray in the Irish Times: Swift "unearths [from his subjects] not a story, nor a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence." Said the Irish Press: "An almost embarrassing candor . . . Here is a painter who seems to have gone back to the older tradition and to have given the most searching consideration to the composition of his painting." Dublin, which likes authors who write with a shillelagh, understood an artist who painted with one. In five days eight of the paintings were sold.
Paddy Swift does not look like a tough guy. A tall, gangling youngster with long sideburns and mild brown eyes, he is largely self-taught. He did his best to avoid school altogether, and when rounded up and set at a desk, he spent his time sketching instead of learning his Latin. Then came "a short period during which I tried to get the family used to the idea that I didn't want a job."
The Word Is Tension. By 1950, Paddy was in Paris, living in a cheap Left Bank hotel and growing an existentialist beard. He had tackled Paris with -L-25 in his pockets, but that was soon gone, and he scrabbled a living doing commission portraits of American G.I.s and tourists. "No picture survived this period," he says. "I sold them all to buy food and drink." Nights, he went to the galleries, and there he found what he wanted to do. He liked such old French masters as the 17th century's Nicolas Poussin, the 19th century's Eugene Delacroix, such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti (TIME, July 2, 1951) and Britain's Francis Bacon. The much-admired decorative style of the Matisses is not for Paddy Swift. "Art," he thinks, "is obviously capable of expressing something more closely related to life than these elegant designs." His main idea is to suggest the tensions he finds in life. "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."
When each day's work is done, Paddy Swift lays down his brush to spend the evening talking, drinking, going to frequent movies. Says he: "I like sitting in the dark among people. It gives me the same sort of pleasant sensation that I get from a hot bath." It relieves the tension.
-No kin to Jonathan (Gulliver's Travels) Swift, dean of Dublin's St. Patrick's Cathedral (1713-45)-
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