Gerard Dillon, “Mending Nets, Aran”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 84.3 x 92 cm, Private Collection
The Aran Islands, dramatically located off the west coast of Ireland, have long held a fascination for Irish artists and writers. At the turn of the 19th century, its preservation of the Irish language and its tightly-knit community”s traditional life intimately bound to the land and sea represented something wholly other, indeed sacred, from the modernity that was encroaching Ireland.
One of the definitive accounts of this existence was recorded by John Millington Synge, the playwright and writer who first visited the islands in 1898, in his 1907 book, “The Aran Islands”. illustrated by Jack Butler Yeats. Synge’s profound experiences of the island’s communities informed his greatest and most famous writing, “The Playboy of the Western World”, a three-act play first performed at the Abby Theater in Dublin on the twenty=sixth of January in 1907.
By the time of Francis Gerard Dillon’s arrival forty years later in the 1940s, the nature and shape of these communities had been changing as the 20th centruy advanced; yet they still preserved a magic and mystery that entrhalled him. For Dillon, life in the West of Ireland represented a new freedom for him. It was an escape from the conflicts, both internal and external, that had dogged Dillon’s upbringing and adult life in Belfast and London. This release from past tensions fed directly into his painting.
Just as Synge evoked these communities with words, Dillon caught their spirit through paint. His naïve, child-like painting style imbued his work with an innocence, poetry and joy that is representative of both the Islanders way of life and Dillon’s response to them. His paintings are rich visual stories which kept the rich story-telling tradition that was integral to the Aran Islands’ culture.