Aidan Dillon is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, where he earned a degree in Urban Studies and a minor in Landscape Design and Planning. He lives in Minneapolis and continues to produce work in his small home studio. Aidan has sold dozens of works, been featured in multiple shows and galleries in Minneapolis, and has curation and installation experience through ACME Collective. He has no professional training in art other than Advance Placement courses at Evanston Township High School, where he graduated in 2018. When not studying the social and cultural impacts of the built environment in major cities, he continues to create challenging, playful, and abstract work reflecting the urban spaces in which he both studies and lives.
When creating my paintings, I try to form challenging compositions that relate to space, color, and line. I use mostly acrylic paint with charcoal and colored pastels, with newer works incorporating collage and acrylic pen. Mediums for my work span from MDF board, cardboard, foamboard, wood, and canvas. Lately, I have been concentrating on incorporating consumer products, branding, and household objects into my pieces while also exploring ideas of graffiti seen on the streets of Minneapolis and Chicago. I am intrigued and always astutely interested in tagging and other graffiti mediums and the way these displays of public art influence the built and social environment of cities. I continue to pull influence and research from personal observations and experiences as well as varied art forms such as photography, graphic and consumer design, contemporary and modern art, and sculpture. Still, most of the work lends back to the relationships of shape, composition, and line in abstract forms while using personal sketches and thoughts to enhance the work. Many pieces of mine are created on cardboard, traditionally not a common medium to produce on. As a young artist, I often find myself using cardboard because of the abundance and affordability of the material. I have grown more appreciation and love for the material and find that cardboard plays into both my style and art-making process while enhancing the subjects of my work.