Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) A Wet Day, Ireland Oil on board, 38.5 x 52.5 cm, (15.1 x 20.45'') Signed Exhibited: Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, exhibition untraced San Francisco, San Francisco Museum...

Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) A Wet Day, Ireland Oil on board, 38.5 x 52.5 cm, (15.1 x 20.45'') Signed Exhibited: Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, exhibition untraced San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art, New Irish Painters, 1950 (where lent by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts) This is one of a number of works which the artist undertook with quasi religious or historical themes including using the same female figure in Christmas Nativity scenes, and placed in his house on Inishlacken, off Roundstone, Connemara. The Roundstone of the period when he was painting there was full of powerful women, both local and incomers, as well as the women coming in by boat from South Connemara on fair days and for shopping. The sea routes were the common highway even at that time for those coming from Maoinis, Cill Chiar?n and Carraroe. Roundstone like much of Connemara was devastated by the failure of the potato crop in successive years from 1841 culminating in the great disaster of 1845/46 when diphtheria and typhoid were added to the misery of Famine. Here we see a mother sheltering her children from the driving western rain standing on the beginnings of the Bog Road which ran from just outside Roundstone joining the old Nimmo Road at Ballinaboy. The range of hills as far as Shanaheever and Barr Na haille and the Errislannen peninsula can be seen in the distance. The ponies which were plentiful on Errisbeg and as far as the lower slopes of the mountain towards the lakes with which that part of the country is strewn are given some symbolic as well as a more prosaically decorative function in the painting. The artist spent a great deal of his working life finding pictorial devices by way of surface marks in some graphic method to portray his surface pre- occupations with picture or image making. He used sand, gravel stones, tissue paper to make papier colles and sgraffito techniques in order to get his meaning onto the canvas. Here we can see where he uses long stripes of paint to give the sense of the rain falling heavily on the shawled woman and her cowering children. The shawl which is woven from oiled wool had terrific water resistant properties, and she's wearing the traditional red underskirt also woven from heavy madder dyed wool and equally water resistant. It is an inconic work of it's type and period and indeed the work is so atmospheric one can see why it was selected to travel in the exhibition of Irish paintings, New Irish Painters which travelled to San Francisco, Boston and Toledo, Ohio in 1950. Dillon was just back from London and seen to be in the vanguard of modernism with a debt to figurative art. This is a powerful work full of the enduring qualities of humankind, and has relevance just as much today as it did when painted 50 years ago. Ciar?n MacGonigal November 2006

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