“I believe that this life is merely preparing us for the next and that painting the wonders of creation around us, is a prayer of promise and thanksgiving.

 We don’t ever reach perfection in this life but the joy is in the striving”

Dorothy Swain

Dorothy’s painting covered a broad range of subjects, but it was landscapes and flowers which formed the bulk of her output and, indeed, it was in these subjects, that her work was selected to be exhibited by the Royal Academy of Art.

Throughout her life, Dorothy had to adapt her love of painting around a busy family life, which required discipline and dedication. The philosophy which she held about art clearly helped, as evidenced by this quote which she kept on her studio door:

‘Because, in rare moments of clear vision we glimpse a higher plane which we cannot reach, it is sufficient to know that it is there to strive for.‘ 

Dorothy believed that “there is no ‘approved’ technique for landscape painters”; no one way of communicating that is superior to another. She did, however, contend that, as with portraiture, the landscape artist must delve deeply into the world of great thought and emotion before arriving at a composition. She should look for an aspect in the countryside around her or a Still Life scene that strikes a chord with her own individual temperament and personality; a scene in which she can fall in love with the sensation present in nature and be totally receptive to it. The aim is not to provide a mere photographic record of the scene, but to “create anew from Creation” as it inspires and provokes an emotional and even spiritual response in our very core. The resulting painting should clearly communicate the wealth of emotions that have been triggered in the artist by the scene that lies before her.

“Flowers are not just pretty things which make a nice picture, a splash of colour. At least that’s not the way I see them. To me they are each and every one a miracle of growth”. This statement by Dorothy provides a helpful introduction to her perspective on flower painting, since the arranging of her compositions was never to select the most beautiful and finest specimens from the garden, but to highlight the “dynamic power of plant shapes” by placing flowers according to their growing habits. As her goal, Dorothy stated that, through flower paintings, she must express “the Creator and me and my childhood alone, and my poor attempts to understand and to love. Before painting (I must) think right back through all my fifty years of experience”.

There is a world of difference between portraiture and photography. The skill of figure painting is not to show off technique and cleverness in trying to capture a true physical likeness. Such a pursuit would render portrait painting dull and remove much of the very creativity there exists in art. In Dorothy’s own instructional booklet on figure drawing, she insists that a basic understanding of physical anatomy is essential to be able to depict the human form with understanding. It is, for example, impossible to detail where there is flexibility or rigidity, weakness or strength unless there is a “a firm grasp of how the main muscles of the body work in conjunction with those which give counter-action, as only then are we ready to ‘understand with a pencil’ what we see”. Yet, knowledge of the physical is not enough, since portraiture demands an understanding of what makes a person tick; who they are in their innermost being. Her role is to portray not what is seen but what is perceived, “which may necessitate exaggeration, distortion, definitely simplification, but above all a thorough knowledge of what goes on in the human form”.