Gerard Dillon

Gerard Dillon was born in Belfast in 1916. His development as an artist was delayed due to his need to earn an income, working as a house painter. This work gave him a familiarity with the materials of paint and brushes but he found it "...a bit boring having to cover large spaces with the one colour only when my hand was itching to draw and compose". As an artist he was self-taught, because he disliked the regimentation of formal art classes. In 1934, at the age of eighteen, he left Belfast for London where he worked at a number of jobs; he was not able to take up painting full-time until the late 1930s.

Although based in London, much of the inspiration for his art came from Ireland, particularly Connemara which he first visited in 1939. He came to live in Dublin during the war, and held his first exhibition there in 1942. After he returned to London he continued to exhibit in Ireland and his work was also exhibited in Paris, Rome and the US. In 1968 he came to live in Dublin where he did some design work for the Abbey Theatre. Gerard Dillon's paintings developed in three distinct stages; following his early expressive, almost naive, work, he adopted an abstract manner of painting, which was the dominant style in his work of the 1960s. In these abstract paintings texture was a major feature and he used various materials such as sand. The final phase in his career is a series of autobiographical paintings, dealing with the early death of his tree brothers and depicting himself as a Pierrot-like figure.