Francis Gerard Dillon was born on 20 April 1916 at Lower Clonard Street, Belfast, the youngest of eight children. He was educated at Raglan Street Public Elementary School and the Christian Brothers’ School, Hardinge Street. He left school at 14, to be apprenticed to the painting and decorating firm of Maurice Sullivan. He travelled to London, working as painter and decorator, labourer, boilerman, and night porter and using his earnings to buy art materials and visit art galleries. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Dillon returned to Belfast and over the next five years, he polished his skills as a painter in Dublin and Belfast. In 1942 his first solo exhibition was opened by his friend and fellow artist, Mainie Jellett at The Country Shop, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. For financial reasons Dillon returned to London in 1944 to work on demolition gangs. In the late 1940’s and during the 1950’s, Dillon spent much time at Roundstone, Connemara - a little village perched on the edge of the Atlantic, the Twelve Pin Mountains commanding the skyline to one side and the sea and the Island of Inishlacken on the other. He and his friends George and Madge Campbell shared a holiday house and made daily rowing trips to the mainland for provisions and a jaunt in Connolly’s Bar. In 1951, McIntyre, Dillon, and Campbell were all resident on the Island, all painting, with Campbell occasionally playing his guitar. The locals took to Dillon, who dressed as they did, with cap, crios (old Irish belt), and pampoutees (soft shoes). They permitted him to involve them in his art works as his subject matter. Neighbouring islanders on Inish Nee posed for one work in their family home, as did another islander of whom Dillon had drawn a sketch, the man appreciated the work, folded it and placed it in his pocket. In 1958 Dillon had the double honour of representing Ireland at the Guggenheim International, and Great Britain at the Pittsburg International Exhibition. He travelled widely in Europe and taught for brief periods in London’s art schools. In 1967 he had a stroke and spent six weeks in hospital. There was a history of heart disease in the family and Dillon quickly realised that he had a problem from which he was likely to die prematurely. The notion of imminent death sent his work into a realm of dreams and paintings intimating his death. A masked clown began to appear in his work, almost floating through a surreal landscape somewhere between the earth and heaven. The artist depicted the pierrot figure many times, as if on a journey of interrogation, questioning his fate. One poignant work shows the pierrot kneeling in a ploughed field with his ear to the ground, while below in layers, we see the skeletons of his dead brothers. Dillon commented that the red-brown of the earth contrasting with the yellow and blues of life above ground displayed a cheerful humour with an underlying sadness. The pierrot, the ploughed field, and the colour combinations portraying surreal land and skyscapes were to continue until his death - they are free, fluid painterly evocations of an escape, a release into a dream world by the experience of his brothers before him. In 1968 he was back in Dublin, where he helped to design sets and costumes for Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock. He continued to paint and also to make tapestries, which he produced on an old Singer sewing machine. Dillon once remarked: ‘George Campbell thinks I am conceited because I like my own paintings so much - but really I think it’s humility not conceit. I see a painting that I did years ago and sit down and look at it and say ‘God, imagine me being able to do that!’ In 1969, Dillon withdrew his artworks from the Belfast leg of the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ as a protest against the Troubles and the ‘arrogance of the Unionist mob’ as he put it in a letter to the Irish Times on 20 August. However, he conceded years later that it was a gesture which was slightly over the top since, as the poet Michael Longley retorted, ‘Belfast needed creativity, it needed people like Gerard Dillon’ at that time. During his last years, Dillon was invited to be involved in a children’s art workshop in The National Gallery of Ireland. Dillon died of another stroke in the Adelaide Hospital, Dublin on 14 June 1971, at the age of 55. In accordance with his wishes, his grave in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery is unmarked. In 1972 the Irish Post Office issued their fourth stamp in the series on Contemporary Irish Art, featuring the painting Black Lake by Dillon.