There was a terrific bit of excitement at Inishmann when everything was on board and all the curraghs had gone back but one. It overturned with one man in it and the sea was very high. It looked like the end of it as he was washed away to the back of the steamer, a long way off. These men live in the sea and by the sea, yet they cannot swim. He kept cool and held an oar under each arm – so it kept him up on top. The islanders on board started to keen (wail) and cry in despair, calling loudly to the island where the curraghs had gone back. Then there was a wonderful race by other curraghmen out to rescue him, which they did. So the steamer sailed on to Inishmore. The first few days we felt strange in Pat’s because he didn’t expect us until the end of September. So we did the next best thing – we looked after ourselves with PJ’s help. The islands are desolate – all rock – small, very small fields and stone walls and terrific grey cliffs facing the outer Atlantic – 300ft high – with mountainous waves thundering over them.
Gerard loved the simplicity and ease of the people of the Aran Islands and the community on the tiny island of Inishlacken where he lived with George Campbell. Inishlacken not only captured his imagination but served as an inspiration for some of his most significant paintings. To get a complete understanding of what lay at the heart of his love of the West, one has to look either at his paintings or at his letters, including this unpublished one from 13 October 1944. In it, he both sketched and described the appeal of Connemara’s rocky landscape:
The stony parts are the parts for me. If you closed your eyes and suddenly opened them, you’d think you’d been transported to the moon. It looks as if some strange gods had been playing stone throwing games, like children do, with an old tin can as a cock-shot, until all around is strewn with stones. These god-like stones are huge boulders standing up all over the place, with here and there peeping behind them little cabins and long cottages, white, stark and elfin-like intruders in this strange stone world. The light is wonderful here. Rocks, stones and boulders change colour all the time. Sometimes they are blue green, other times pink, violet, creamy white and cool grey. Behind and around everywhere, the Twelve Pins (Mountain range) tower up to the rolling clouds. They are forever changing colour too, one peak at a time, so that you can see at times a green peak, an orange-brown one, blue black, purple and grey peaks – it’s terrific … a changing landscape … It’s the difficulty to paint this place that makes it so fascinating. It has so much to give. The fields are small and irregular, marked off by lace-like stone walls. Each field can be a different colour. A field yellow with a violet stone fringe, a brown field with a creamy white border, an emerald one with a grey-green wall and so it can go on and on endlessly.
Deep down, Gerard was a romantic, imbued with a deep love of nature and idealism. Had he not been an artist, I believe he would have been an established poet or short story writer, and the West would have featured prominently in his writings. My father had some of his short stories, one of which brilliantly described life in Lower Clonard Street. Sadly, after my father’s death in 2007, those short stories somehow vanished.
My uncle’s landscapes confirm how much he adored the wild, natural simplicity of Ireland’s west and how it contrasted sharply with his depictions of a desolate Belfast and London in the 1940s and 1950s. Decades later, these paintings were the most sought after by collectors, but I personally preferred the later works he created in a surrealistic vein. They employed the compelling images of Pierrots, or French mimes, hiding behind masks. Behind those masks lurked sadness, loneliness and confusion – mirroring Gerard’s own alienation from the world and the confusion he felt in his personal life. Many of the works, mostly oils and collages, exude an emotional power which evokes strong feelings. He depicted his own drama, as well as human folly. He dressed his Pierrots extravagantly, revealing his love of the theatrical and the dramatic.
I did not see much of my uncle when I was a boy, but he kept in touch with my parents, writing letters to my mother and to his brother Joe. I was especially conscious as a child of their preoccupations with mortality and their frequent use of the words ‘cancer’ and ‘coronary’. The death of my paternal grandmother disturbed our family deeply. Francie, as my father and his siblings called her, was a devout woman who refused to take pain medication when she was dying of cancer. She believed her suffering was atonement for her sins, meaning it was potentially a passport to get her through Heaven’s gates.
More tragedy struck when Uncle Joe had a slight heart attack. From that event until his death, he feared he would die at any moment, alone during the night. He visited my parents every evening, staying late to listen to classical music on a wind-up gramophone and drank lots of tea. He would often leave at two or three in the morning.
In 1961, news reached my parents from London that Uncle Gerard was unwell and suffering from chest pains. I was eleven and soon to embark on a career path Uncle Joe had once considered for himself – the priesthood. There was already one priest in the Dillon family whom I had never met, Uncle Joe’s brother, Vincent. He was a Passionist Father, based in Latin America, and he rarely visited Belfast. My mother described him as tall, dark, distinguished and highly intelligent, though she made it clear she was not his greatest fan. She joked he was more like a passionate Father than a Passionist Father.
She was astonished when he strolled around Belfast dressed like a rich, tanned foreigner in a well-cut suit and no clerical collar. The word ‘effete’ comes to mind when I look back on how she described him. My Uncle Gerard’s biographer, the distinguished art historian, James White, told me over dinner in my home in 1991, he was assured by impeccable sources that Uncle Vincent, the priest, was also gay. George Campbell also confirmed it for me. Gerard, Joe and Molly were gay, so the news about Vincent hardly came as a surprise to me. In contrast, however, the two other Dillon brothers – my grandfather, Patrick, and John – were heterosexual, as was their sister, Annie, who immigrated to Canada and died there.
Uncle Joe supported my decision to enter a seminary at Romsey in Hampshire, England. He bought me new clothes and provided my parents with financial support to pay the monthly tuition fees. A decade later, Uncle Gerard shared with me that if he had been living in Belfast when I was eleven, he would have made sure my parents ‘never offered me to the Church’. In his view, the priesthood was not a career for any sane or creative individual.
A major change occurred in Uncle Gerard’s life in 1968. The lease on his London flat expired and George Campbell persuaded him to move to Dublin and buy a house with Arthur Armstrong, a Northern Ireland painter they both knew well. Gerard considered Arthur an ideal companion because he had ‘no notion of marrying’. He and Gerard bought a house in Ranelagh, a short distance from George and his wife Madge’s place. Dublin had a bohemian spirit, as well as a vibrant art scene, and Gerard soon felt much better physically and emotionally living there. That was good news considering a year earlier he had written a sombre letter to my father after being hospitalised for a month with coronary problems. In it, he wrote, ‘I feel like I’ve walked the path of life onto the lane that leads to the tomb. There’s no doubt about that. Looking around me here, I can see that death has put his hand of each of us.’ Living in Dublin meant Uncle Gerard was subjected to daily radio and television reports about the deteriorating political situation in Northern Ireland. At times, the media accounts zapped his creative energy. His presence in Dublin, however, gave me the opportunity to spend some time in his company.
In April 1971, Uncle Gerard visited Belfast to arrange an exhibition of his works in the Caldwell Gallery. While staying with his friend, the pianist, Tom Davidson, he had a mild stroke and spent several weeks in the Royal Victoria Hospital. I visited him there, and to this day I treasure the memory of sitting on the edge of his bed, chatting about my job as a news