Dylan is a rising star in art

Eilis Ryan

There is just one word needed to describe the artistic skills of Dylan Bennett: phenomenal.

For Dylan, the artist behind every one of the drawings on this page, is just nine years old.

It’s a mind-blowing experience meeting this funny and chatty Collinstown schoolboy and knowing that if you stood still for 15 minutes, the chances are he would have your likeness captured on paper.

In fact, many of his drawings take even less time than that – often as few as five minutes, reveals Dylan’s dad, Paul.

“When I was five I started drawing,” says Dylan, who is happy working with materials as simple as a sheet of paper and a HB pencil.

“Did it come easy to you? Was it easy for you to draw from the beginning?” we ask.

“Well,” he ponders, “I thought it was hard to draw noses when I was, like, five.”

“But you didn’t find the other elements of the face difficult to draw?”

“Well, sometimes the eyes, too.”

But that was all three years ago: nowadays, his technique is to start with the eyes and work from there, sometimes using a ruler to ensure he has the proportions right and sometimes working straight from what he sees in front of him.

The eldest of five, Dylan sometimes presses some of his siblings to sit still for him, but it’s hard to get children so young to stay still for five minutes, so largely he works off photographs.

Inspiration can come from anywhere: “Sometimes he would see someone on TV and ask, who’s this? And I might say, ‘Oh, that’s Gordon Ramsay’ for example,” says Paul.

“And he also does a lot of musicians. Because I’d have the radio on, and I like The Beatles or the Rolling Stones or David Bowie. And he’d say, ‘who are you listening to, Daddy?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, David Bowie’. He’d say, ‘Oh, what does he look like? Tell me about him.’ And when he draws musicians, he listens to the music.”

In Dylan’s mind it’s easier to draw men’s faces than women.

“I think, I’m good at old people, but it’s hard to do women – because of the hair,” he says.

And what makes older people easier to draw?

“It’s probably because,” he says, “a lot of old people have glasses. And beards.”

Paul and wife Lisa are bemused at how easily it seems to come to Dylan.

“We’d be just sitting on the couch with the kids, watching TV, and sometimes the way Dylan is, he would be sitting there making what looks like just strokes, you’d think he was just doing lines, but then you’d look and say, wow, he’s just drawn Michael D Higgins, for example,” says Paul.

Remarkably, Dylan is completely self-taught – and his works show he has an innate understanding of light and how to shade and an instinct that tells him when he has done enough so that he seems never to overwork a drawing.

That said, he reveals, there have been occasions when it’s taken him more than one attempt to get a drawing right. That, he discloses, has actually happened more than once: it’s happened twice.

At this stage, Dylan has dozens of drawings and he shares them on Instagram. Some of them have even caught the eyes of the subjects he’s drawn, and he has had praise for his work from a few celebrity subjects such as Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame, as well as a letter of thanks from the office of President Higgins.

He draws every day – and has discovered that as well as drawing people he enjoys drawing animals. Hence, a number of cat, frog and bird pictures images are now beginning to appear in his portfolio. He also enjoys doing cartoons and caricatures.

Just recently, Dylan has begun to paint and his parents have enrolled him with an art teacher in Castlepollard who is helping him progress in that direction.

There’s a great sense of fun in the Bennett household and Dylan is kind with his younger brother and sisters, Kate, Grace, Molly and Danny, happily trying to help them improve their artistic skills as well.

“There’s no egos,” says Paul, adding that the younger children are definitely benefiting from Dylan’s tutoring.

But it’s not just all about art for Dylan, he’s also a keen footballer and loves his hurling too. Ahead of a trip two weeks ago with his dad and brother to Old Trafford, he did a drawing of Alex Ferguson, and he’s also produced a drawing showing some of the greats from the glory years of Man United – George Best, Bobby Charlton, Eric Cantona, Ryan Giggs and Ronaldo.

Where does he see his gift taking him in the future: “I’d like to be a cartoonist,” says Dylan.

Paul loves the fact that Dylan has a passion for something rather than just focusing on a screen.

Dylan himself is clear that the more he draws, the better he gets: “When I was five, like, I was still good, but I think, when I was six, I was way better. Yeah. And then I got into seven, and I was really good when I was seven.”

He isn’t actually bragging: he is analysing with a maturing eye.

Already, some art fans have asked him to do drawings for them. One lady in America requested that he draw her a flamingo. Another in the UK asked that he draw Shakespeare. And a Dutch company asked him if he would draw some Alice in Wonderland characters for an escape room. And they paid him a fee for the nine cartoons he produced of various characters from the Alice book.

So is it costing the family a fortune in art materials?

“Not at all,” says Paul. “Thank God for ‘Mr Price’!”