11 APRIL 1987, Page 40

On a painting by Patrick Swift

The eye, plunged in a foliage thick as water- weed, a reticulated under-surface, forgets and loses itself where, like a fish, a fin- or spine-flick glints in Westbourne Terrace as a car-roof flashes under leafy branches: the unimaginable everyday world, consulted from a third-floor window. Those trees' Laocoon arms, light that impinges on a pavement, its fall broken by their greenstuff like water, here imagined and imaged in oils on hardboard, not as a chosen aspect but for being there; universal because. David Wright