Ken Kirkby (courtesy of the family)
B.C. landscape painter Ken Kirkby lived a life with nary a dull moment.
According to Kenneth Michael Kirkby’s personal website, the prominent B.C. artist was born Sept. 1, 1940, during the Second World in the middle of an air raid on London, England. “The circumstances of his arrival was a foreshadowing of the warrior-painter he was to become.”
Indeed, Kirkby’s adventures were just beginning. The Kirkby family was living in Portugal when Kenneth, at age 16, had his first solo exhibition. It sold out. The critics raved. Alas, all his other Portugal paintings were lost when the family made a “hasty departure” from political turmoil and moved to Canada.
Kenneth Kirkby arrived in Vancouver in 1958 and, after working a winter in northern British Columbia, continued north and, for the next five years, he walked, paddled and sledded across the Canadian Arctic, from Coppermine to Baffin Island.
“The endless drawings he made of his experiences in the Arctic drawn on rolls of adding machine tapes and then mailed to his family arrived soaked through with oil leached from the seal skins in which they were wrapped -- destroying all,” his website says.
Many more adventures followed. But they have come to an end. Kenneth Kirkby died June 20, of cancer in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island; he was 82. According to his friend Mark Hume, Kirkby died peacefully. At his bedside were his wife, artist Nana Cook, and his son Michael, who had flown from his home in Japan.
Kirky painted daily throughout his life, often for long hours. His landscapes were popular. His most famous work he called Isumataq—a word in Inuktitut meaning "an object in the presence of which wisdom might show itself." The oil on canvas portrait of the Arctic is 12 feet high and 152 feet long. The giant painting, or sometimes just parts of it, traveled the country being shown in the Parliament Buildings, at Art Expo in New York, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and, for a year at Ontario Place, where a million visitors viewed the masterpiece.
Sources: Kirkby’s website and The Globe and Mail