Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by Patrick Swift

For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.

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.

Life is more important than art - quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.

All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity.

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.

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

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.