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Donald
Swan has been painting for over forty five years.
Now in his eighties he
has covered a wide range of subject matter in his long career ranging from maritime
to landscape, and from portraits to book illustration. Born in Glasgow
in 1918 he joined the merchant navy in 1935 and later the royal Navy, woked as
a fisherman and was for a time the mate on a comercial sailing barge. It
was whilst recovering from a long illness that Donald took up painting, later
studying at Glasgow and Arbroath in the late forties. In 1949 Donald moved
to Cornwall where he studied pottery with Bernard and Michael Leach, eventually
setting up the Casltle-an-Dynas Pottery with his wife Elizabeth, a Cornish girl
- and the subject of many of his portraits. He returned to Scotland in
1972 but has recently moved back to Penzance where he had a one-man exhibition
of of over forty portraits of his family at the Penlee House Gallery - one of
the few living artists to be shown there. Although mainly known for his
fine portraits, through his long association with the sea has built another reputation
as a maritime painter and in 1969 he was commissioned to paint a series of pictures
chronicling the history of the Tea Clipper ‘Cutty Sark’. one of which
still hangs aboard the ship at Grenwich. He also has a Nativity in the
“Cathedral of the Isles” on the Isle of Cumbrae and a portrait in the
National Gallery of Scotland.
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