Nigel Swift | Earth's Loveliness

'My first paintings as a teenager were of a local park, and in particular a line of pink blossom trees there in the spring. There is something helpful to the artist about a creative gardener’s work that sorts nature into beauty that particularly resonates with the human mind. The struggle between order and chaos has been started by the gardener and so is a gift to the artist. 

As TS Eliot said, we return to our beginnings, and know the place for the first time. My work has taken a winding path through drawing people, sculpture and abstraction, with a career-long detour into model-making for film and TV, to return to gardens and flowers. This subject matter, although it has been a constant in the history of art, has been very unfashionable in all the years since I started at the Slade in 1981. Tutors there, taking one look at me, expected abstract expressionism, or some sort of angry political ranting. A 6 foot lad painting flowers did not fit the fashion at the time, and seemed an irrelevance. 

Another teenage passion that has never gone away is art books. On an away trip with Humberside County under 18s football team, I sneaked away and bought a book of reproductions from the Washington Museum of Art. I still have that book in quite an extensive library of art books that I pour over regularly. So as well as gardens there are paintings of gardens, on the page, in my head, and on various travels through the years, enriched by a second degree in art history that I did at Birkbeck college 15 years ago. 

So these are my beginnings: gardens and flowers and paintings of gardens and flowers. And what you see on the walls in this show is a man finally rediscovering who he is with the hindsight of many years trying to please others. Finally, these paintings please me.'

- Nigel Swift, December 2024

Michelangelo