Spanish Civil War Blue

Colin Middleton once claimed to be the only Surrealist painter working in Ireland in the 1930s. He was at that time working for the family damask designing business, which he joined as an apprentice in 1927 and which he took over entirely when his father died in 1935. His Surrealist works combined his flair for design with a wonderfully vivid imagination. Edward Sheehy (cited in D. Hall, Colin Middleton, Belfast, 2001, p. 22) commented in 1950 that 'Middleton sought to create a private world which would be, as it were, a challenge to the world of reality, a world independent of the senses'.