"It is customary nowadays for a painter to make an artist’s statement. I prefer to let my work and what I did with it stand as such."
Ken Kirkby
The paintings and drawings displayed on this website represent only a portion of Ken Kirkby’s artwork. The thousands of drawings he created during his early years in1950s Portugal, a country in the grip of an ever increasing dictatorship, were all burned prior to the Kirkby family’s hasty departure for the safety of Canada. 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. Except for these lost drawings the works shown here span a lifetime, seventy years⎯so far.
Kirkby still paints full time in his seaside studio with the vigor, devotion and appetite of a much younger man. He recently married painter Nana Cook, and this union has led Kirkby to create a new project, producing a series of full colour art books of their artworks, two of which are featured on this website, Ken Kirkby’s North and Ken Kirkby The Watcher.