Friends in art reunited

Drogheda’s Nano Reid and Belfast-born Gerard Dillon became close friends and often painted together – and while you are unlikely to mistake the work of one for the other, there is common ground between them, as a new exhibition shows

AN EXHIBITION at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, Co Louth, explores the relationship between Nano Reid and Gerard Dillon, each of whom played an important role in the development of modernism in 20th-century Irish art. Did their personal friendship translate into shared artistic aims and approaches? While it is displayed side by side, you are unlikely to mistake the work of one for the other, but at the same time it’s no surprise that there might be common ground: they were on close terms for several decades, had shared interests, and often spent time and painted together.

Reid is now indelibly associated with Drogheda, though during her lifetime it pained her that her birthplace did not accord her the artistic recognition she deserved. In fact, the local populace, she complained, had little interest in painting at all. She had harsh and not entirely unfounded views on the shortcomings of the municipality, and bemoaned what she saw as the destruction of the town’s historical fabric. She was born in 1900 – she did not like to be pinned down about her birth date, which is often given as 1905 or later, but, in his carefully detailed biography of her, Declan Mallon plumps for 1900.

HER FATHER WAS a publican, and the family was comfortably off. In 1921 she became a student at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, at first commuting daily but then basing herself in the capital. Fairly small in stature, she comes across, in various descriptions, as being shy and reticent but also feisty, with forthright views and a waspish tongue. She went on to study in Paris and then, dissatisfied, at the Central School of Art and the Chelsea Polytechnic in London. She settled back in Dublin, and at one stage the flat she shared with a friend became the centre for an odd, bohemian group of younger figures, including Pearse Hutchinson. Her plan to become a portrait painter foundered, not for lack of ability but through temperamental unsuitability. Flattery and diplomacy were not her strong points. She nonetheless established herself as a highly regarded painter on the progressive side of Irish art.

Her eventual artistic voice is distinctive and makes no attempt to be ingratiating. She draws on post-impressionism and expressionism, but doesn’t hesitate to bring in aspects of cubism at will, and she has her own subdued – at times murky – palette. Apparently a visit to a show by Belgian painter Marie Howet in 1937 encouraged her own boldly linear, highly subjective mode of representation. The dreamy, indeterminate space that is characteristic of many of both her and Dillon’s paintings strongly recalls Marc Chagall.

DILLON, BORN IN Belfast in 1917, was the son of a postman. He apprenticed as a painter and decorator, and pursued that occupation (and later on others in the building trade) in London for many years throughout his working life. He was a restlessly inventive and industrious artist. While he was on a visit to Belfast in 1939, the outbreak of war prevented his return to London, and he headed south to Dublin instead, one of a number of Northern Irish artists to do so. At some stage he met Reid, and thus began a long, mutually beneficial association.

Hilda van Stockum, a fellow student of hers at the Metropolitan School, said that it was her feeling that Reid would like to be more attractive to men than seemed to be the case. She was certainly wary of men, and warned van Stockum against them. Was she initially attracted to Dillon, and did that attraction become, in time, friendship? Or was he a safe prospect as a male friend because he was gay? In any case, their friendship thrived.

To a greater extent than Reid, Dillon worked his way through a gamut of stylistic and technical possibilities in his paintings, very much in the manner of an autodidact. As with Reid, he didn’t have great natural facility as a draughtsman or a painter, but there is a tremendous vitality to his work, and a continual openness to possibility that makes it engaging. He drew equally, for example, on the pictorial method of the ancient high-cross carvers and the Parisian avant-garde. He was inclined towards folksy, even sentimental narratives, which can make some of his paintings seem either especially accessible or unduly cloying, depending on your point of view.

Like many Irish artists, including Reid, he was particularly drawn to the west of Ireland, and around 1950 managed to spend a year in Connemara, based in a cottage on Inishlacken, close to Roundstone.

Reid went to stay with him, as she did on other occasions, and he with her. Dillon valued the west of Ireland rather nostalgically, as a bastion of folk traditions as yet spared the creeping uniformity of modernisation. In his work, the landscape is always a backdrop to the lives, customs and traditions of the people, not an end in itself.

Reid drew a huge fund of inspiration from her birthplace and its surroundings, notably the Boyne Valley which, as Seán O’Faoláin put it, “silently murmurs ancestral memories”. A series of spare, linear ink drawings of sites along the valley, accompanied by a text by Elizabeth Hickey, was published as a book, I Send My Love Along the Boyne, in 1966. The style of the drawings, and indeed Reid’s paintings, echoes the linear patterning of Celtic and early Christian art. Judging by her paintings, she liked the dense, jumbled textures generated in the landscape by the designs and accidents of history, all mingled with the unruly present, and generations of stories told about places and people. She wasn’t so keen on digging up and reorganising the past, and said she’d given up painting the Boyne Valley after the excavations of the 1960s. Dillon went to stay with her in Drogheda and, with one of her sisters as chauffeur, they’d make painting excursions into the countryside.

DILLON DIED AT a relatively young age in 1971, having settled in Dublin in 1968. Living back in Drogheda from the early 1960s, Reid survived him by 10 years, but she was increasingly prone to arthritis and other ailments as time went by. The works in the Highlanes exhibition, curated by Dr Riann Coulter, offer an exposition of their decades-long artistic conversation. Each acknowledged the other’s influence, and the show is a perfect way of tracing the surprisingly subtle workings of that influence, and also of placing each within the broader historical context. Reid would surely have been proud of it, and no doubt gratified to be acknowledged so conspicuously in her hometown.

Nano Reid and Gerard Dillon is at the Highlanes Municipal Gallery, Laurence St, Drogheda until Jan 20 041-9803311