Show Michael Dillon a wall, and he sees a blank canvas. He tells Nicoline Greer about his elaborate murals.
As career paths go, going from a muddy farmyard to the interiors of exquisite Georgian houses, French châteaux and a palace in the desert of Dubai, is quite a shift. But, somehow, that is the road that muralist Michael Dillon's work has taken him on. The murals he paints reflect a mind grounded in fantasy. Take the African tent room in a house in Co Kildare, for example. The child who wakes up in the bedroom is greeted in the morning by the sight of elephants and zebras crossing a plain, visible as they look out of the awnings of their "tent". The same person then migrates to the bathroom and to a new latitude as they enter the Arctic-themed bathroom. "A little surprise," Dillon calls it. Well, yes, it is. Just a bit.
Dillon is a native of Termonfeckin. His family is "Norman-Irish", made all the more colourful by his mother's side of the family - sugar-planters from Mauritius - bequeathing him a fluency in French.
Growing up in the countryside, he used to draw the ducks he had shot. But, he says, painting was not really encouraged. After studying at Trinity College, he and his English wife, Henrietta, lived in Normandy for two years, where he worked as a farm manager. He farmed in Ireland, France and New Zealand, but after seven years of getting up on winter mornings to the smell of silage and manure, he decided that it was time for a change.
Through his brother-in-law, Alec Cobb, who owned Newbridge House, he was given the encouragement to begin painting. When Newbridge House left the Cobb family after centuries, the local council was doing a lot of renovation and restoration work, and Dillon was brought on board. "That was my big beginning, really," he says.
Since then, it has been word of mouth that has got him work, mostly in private houses. He has worked all over the world, from Mustique to Madrid. When we meet, he is taking a break from a job in a Georgian building on Fitzwilliam Square where he is painting panels on the wall, complete with a hidden doorway to a secret boudoir.
In another "fantasy room" in Co Kildare, a converted barn became a rather grand dining room But his painting of the ceiling has converted it back to a ruin, so when diners look up they see the sky, hawks flying overhead and even tufts of grass growing out of the top of the crumbling walls.
At this summer's Loughcrew Opera, La Traviata, organiser Charles Naper referred to Dillon as "Loughcrew's almost resident muralist." Every year for the flamboyant production and picnic on the estate of Loughcrew, Dillon paints the interior of the marquee and designs invitations on a theme.
One would expect a muralist to do a lot of religious work in churches. And, in a way, some of his work is religious - but always with a twist. At his daughter's school, St Mary's in Shaftesbury, about 40 of the schoolgirls have been immortalised on the walls of the chapel. "The idea is that they give glory to God. Some are playing the violin, some have got their tennis rackets, some are playing with the school cat, some are singing," he says. His son's school, Milton Abbey in Dorset, also got the Michael Dillon treatment for its centenary.
One of his most recent jobs has been in the chapel of a château in France. This is an ongoing work, but the client is a fan. "He calls me Michel des Anges - rather than Michelangelo - because he wanted this chapel painted with angels, so I compare him to Pope Julian, who was a rather difficult patron," Dillon says with a self-effacing smile.
He has brought the Banyan trees and monkeys of Cambodia's Angkor Wat to the interior of an English National Trust house; the Alps to a house in Co Wicklow and a Pompeii ruin with Venetian views to a room in Madrid. He has even painted the interior of a palace in the middle of the Dubai desert.
Dillon's ideas come from consultations with clients, and he often lets the setting of the house dictate the content of the picture. For example, the Kilkenny foxhounds appear on the walls of the Mount Juliet hotel. But in many cases, his imagination dictates what clients get. He doesn't have to have been to Morocco to bring that country's beaches and palm trees to a Jacuzzi room in London.
Whether it is fairies delicately sewing dresses out of tulips, or Roman foxhounds running around a domed ceiling, his paintings are guaranteed to elicit a smile. And this is how he manages to evade the pretentious. While the work is impressive, and is usually on a grand scale, you get the feeling that all he really wants to do is have a bit of fun.