Apparition in Landscape

Dick Swift

This marvelous surrealist lithograph depicts a creature and a landscape quite unknown and unidentifiable. The imagery of Apparition in Landscape is firmly anchored in the 1950s. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950 and a genre of Sci-Fi movies followed, including Destination Man, The Flying Saucer, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Not of this Earth. On 4 October 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. Many would believe that earth was visited by UFOs long before 1957.

Dick Swift (born Richard H. Swift, Jr.), printmaker, educator, and illustrator, was born in Long Beach, California on January 29, 1918. His studies began in 1938 at the Chouinard Art Institute where he was enrolled for three years. In 1943, Swift moved to New York to study for a year at the Art Students’ League where his principal teachers were Reginald Marsh, Will Barnet, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Morris Kantor. In 1946, he studied under Rico Lebrun at the Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles. Swift returned to his art training in 1954, studying for two years at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles where his influential teachers were Ernest Freed and Guy Maccoy. He continued his studies at the Pasadena City College before entering Los Angeles State College where he earned his B.A. degree in 1957. Swift studied under Paul Darrow and Roger Kunz at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles and earned his M.F.A. in 1958. He also studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris between 1964 and 1965.

Swift began his teaching career in 1946 at Occidental College. He joined the faculty at the California State University at Long Beach in 1958 and developed the highly regarded printmaking program and studios. He was a member of the American Color Print Society and the Los Angeles Print Society, and served as its president in 1968 and 1969. He exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Japan, and Europe receiving more than forty awards.

Dick Swift’s work is represented in the collections of Baylor University, San Jose State University, and Wichita State University, as well as the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Museum, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the California State University at Long Beach, the Canton Art Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Zanesville Art Institute.