Beschreibung:

THE HOLY ISLAND Gerard Dillon (1916-1971)
Signature: with exhibition label on reverse Medium: oil and sand on board Dimensions: 36 x 48in. (91.44 x 121.92cm) Provenance: Estate of the artist; Collection of Leo Smith, owner of Dawson Gallery; By whom bequeathed to his brother, Frank Smith; Private collection; Frederick Gallery, Dublin, 1996; Private collection; Whyte's, 28 November 2006, lot 60; Private collection Exhibited: Literature: Holy Island brings together two of Gerard Dillon’s favourite themes – the landscape of the west of Ireland and Celtic relief sculpture – with the technical innovation of adding sand to oil paint that ... he developed during the late 1950s. First visiting the west of Ireland in 1939, Dillon made the landscape, people and traditions of the western seaboard reoccurring themes of his art. Like West of Ireland Landscape, circa 1945 (National Gallery of Ireland), and High Cross Panel, circa 1949, Holy Island draws on the Celtic relief sculpture that Dillon had sketched during his visits to Monasterboice and Mellifont Abbey with Nano Reid Unlike West of Ireland Landscape, where ordinary people go about their business in a landscape populated by standing stones, ancient ruins and Celtic crosses, Holy Island is a fantastical scene where two men dressed in religious robes and a saintlike figure, complete with halo and crucifix, kneel in prayer as a blue goat leaps through the air above them. Reminiscent of Chagall’s dreamlike paintings that incorporate both Christian and Jewish religious imagery, Holy Island mixes Christian and pagan iconography that may relate directly to St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg, a place of pilgrimage that dates back to the early Irish Church. Although Dillon had become disillusioned with the Catholic Church in which he was raised, like Chagall who combined imagery drawn from Christianity, Judaism and folklore to explore his identity as a Russian Jew, Dillon’s use of iconography from Celtic Christianity can be interpreted as an effort to connect to a particularly Irish tradition. The island setting of Holy Island is also significant because Dillon considered islands as havens from the many social and religious constraints of life in 1950s Ireland. As James White has suggested Dillon’s love of the island of Inishlackan, where he spent the best part of a year in the 1950s, was due to the fact that it was a place where he could ‘cut himself off for a spell and live in a tiny cottage, with no social life to speak of and a boat journey away from barracks, church or pub – all this gave him the feeling of having found a land free of all the restrictions and suggestions of oppression which he had come to accept as being there to offend him’.1 While the imagery in Holy Island was drawn from historical sources, Dillon’s medium was experimental. In February 1958 Dillon wrote to James White ”I’ve discovered a new way, an exciting way to use sand with my painting. Remember when you were a child – maybe you didn’t do it. You found an old glass pane, spat on it and drew with the finger, spreading the spittle, then you poured fine dust or sand over the glass and the dust stuck to the spit-drawing. Well I’ve done that with sand, different coloured sands … I did this with paint – put on with brush, knife, pour the sand over it all, until all is sand, then tilt and let the sand run off and Lo, you have a wonderful exciting picture. It’s the first time I have ever seen anything like it. I know Picasso and Braque used sand but not like this. It’s completely new”.2 Although Dillon’s experiments with sand coincided with his first forays into abstraction in 1957–58, Holy Island proves that he also used sand in figurative works and it is likely that the painting dates to this period of experimentation. 1 White, James, Gerard Dillon An Illustrated Biography, Wolfhound Press, Dublin, 1994, page 10. 2 Gerard Dillon letter to James White 20 February 1958, quoted by James White in Gerard Dillon An Illustrated Biography, page 78. Dr Riann Co