Biography:
(b Arklow, Co. Wicklow, 29 July 1917; d Dublin, 1979). Irish painter and writer. After leaving school in Dublin, he lived with his widowed mother and brothers in Belfast and worked in various jobs. He published Now in Ulster (Belfast, 1944), a volume of verse and short stories, with his brother Arthur. He began painting during the blitz of Belfast, when he was working in an aircraft factory, taking the bomb damage as his subject-matter. Working with the painter Daniel O'Neill (1920-74) reinforced his romanticism. His association with Gerard Dillon (1916-71), with whom he travelled to Connemara (to paint landscapes) and later to London, likewise intensified an interest in bohemian characters that led him to visit Spain in the early 1950s. His frequent prolonged stays in Catalunya and Malaga, and his contact with Spanish art, had a lasting effect, epitomized in the isolated dignity of the figure in Spanish Match-seller (c. 1959; Cork, Crawford Mun. A.G.).
