Michael Dillon
Born in the west of Ireland I am the product of an upbringing in, by today’s standards, a large family in a rural setting. As a child I was absorbed in nature and was constantly drawing and painting. Being Irish at that time meant there was a constant hunger to explore the world. Aged 19 I did and moved to London where I studied life drawing, printmaking and illustration at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and the City Literary Institute. I joined a group of artists, Chameleon, and we exhibited work in the Smith Gallery, Covent Garden, The Bloomsbury Theatre and the Cooltan Centre in Brixton. I shifted my attention to music and gigged around London for a few years before going back to college and completing a degree in English Literature. I returned to Ireland in 2001 – a very different place – and went back to music for a few years, writing an album Black Economy. And that has been the cycle- painting, writing, music – for most of my life. Sometimes they work together, sometimes one takes over for a while.
Many artists have influenced me over the years, and sometimes music had as big an influence on my painting as any other source of inspiration. But something has changed over the last few years. Perhaps it was during Covid, when most people had time to slow, take note of different things than before.
I have over the last couple of years moved almost completely over to abstract expressionism. In hindsight, this was always coming! It’s easy enough to trace the development from landscapes and figurative compositions which were, over time becoming more and more abstract. The last works I did which had any element of definite form were a series of prints commissioned by Athenry Council. Since then expressionism has taken over. Why? It’s partly about process where I try to rid myself of conscious thought as much as possible.
Somewhere in my consciousness I have absorbed colours and forms and when the time is right they work their way through me and onto the canvas.
I work very quickly and it’s a sense of things, rather than a plan that drives the performance. During this spell there is a constant movement between balance and form. If I try to analyse what is going on at this time I would say that I am trying to capture things I have seen and have registered in the mind’s eye. Living in the west of Ireland is a constant assault on one’s visual senses. The eye simply cannot take in all the minute by minute changes of the light.
I can only describe the process as an urge. I don’t necessarily have an image or finished piece in mind that I want to complete. My sense is that I have things to create, there are paintings to come out and they themselves will decide what form they will take. Somewhere in my consciousness I have absorbed colours and forms and when the time is right they work their way through me and onto the canvas. This is why I use the word “performance”. There’s a speed and rhythm and energy that must run together and express themselves.
For the most part the paintings have a life of their own. Once they come to life the greatest challenge is to know when to stop. I try to avoid the feeling of having spoiled or overworked something when it should have been left alone. Once I’ve finished I love to see things in the paintings that I hadn’t at the time of working on them. It’s like they are best left to “breathe” for a time. It constantly surprises me when people see different things in them that I don’t and the greatest sense of all is when people recognize works where I was completely enveloped in the process, as the relationship I have with the works is mostly very different than what others’ have.