A Child's World - Belfast

Artist Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971)

Date1955

MediumOil on board

Dimensions55.8 x 61 cm

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 1995. © The Estate of Gerard Dillon.

Object number1887

DescriptionAlthough Gerard Dillon briefly attended Belfast College of Art, he was essentially a self-taught artist who painted in a distinctive and deliberate primitive style. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a painting and decorating firm on the Falls Road. Two years later he left Belfast for London where he was engaged in a number of odd jobs, using spare cash earned to purchase art materials. During the Second World War he returned to Ireland. Dillon exhibited often and widely throughout his lifetime and he was a long-standing committee member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. He also spent time abroad in Italy and Spain.

Dillon once remarked that he was "always trying to see with a child's innocence and sincerity'" and his subject matter is sometimes drawn from his own written childhood memories. A Child's World, Belfast depicts a young girl on an empty street at twilight and reflects the recurring theme of the figure in isolation in Dillon's work. Surrounded by the chalk remnants of the day's play, as well as political and other graffiti, she casts a lonely figure standing in the hopscotch 'home' while gazing at a drawn outline of a mother and child. (JO'D)

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