Biography

BARRY KIRK was born in Kent in 1933 and educated at Westminster School, Canterbury School of Art and The Royal College of Art, where he studied etching, in particular, under Julian Trevelyan. Subsequently, he taught at both Canterbury and Guildford Schools of Art, eventually developing a successful career rising to Principal of the College.

Throughout the 1960s Barry Kirk continued painting and printmaking as personal pursuits, first concentrating on urban subjects, often with figures: interiors, markets, builders' yards and back gardens. Later he developed an individual mode of relief-painting on canvas, using modern synthetic media, a technique which led for a while to fully three-dimensional sculpture. During the 1980s Kirk returned to oil painting and watercolour, a development which coincided with a preference for subjects drawn from the countryside, fuelled by many extended visits to the north Norfolk coastline, which would become a major source of subject matter.

Represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1993, Barry Kirk took part in the Gallery's 1994 theme exhibition The Piero Trail, contributing a major composition reinterpreting Piero della Francesca's Nativity. In 1995 he participated in Per Una Selva Oscura: artists take to the forest, a celebration of the experience of woodland prompted by the enigmatic opening of Dante's Inferno, in 1997 he contributed to The Saxon Shore and in 2006 he contributed to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty-five painters today. Kirk has held one-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1997, 2001 and 2004.

A complete retrospective of Barry Kirk's work, Barry Kirk - Painting Nature, is being presented at The Harley Gallery in Nottinghamshire from 19 March to 1 May 2006. This exhibition will also include an intriguing, full-scale replica of the artist's studio.

Barry Kirk

In pursuit of his close exploration of the countryside and country gardens in England and France, Barry Kirk, painter of nature, owes a significant debt to the Netherlandish illuminators, who recorded flowers, plants, small creatures so appreciatively, and to the virtuoso draughtsmanship of Dürer and his circle in the south German renaissance.

Barry Kirk creates a series of miniature worlds, often seen at eye-level to an ant or a butterfly and his fascination with leaves, evoked with a palette deploying a seemingly inexhaustible range of greens, weaves a heady magic, a rapture reminiscent of the intense focus on natural phenomena, bordering almost on the surreal, achieved by the court painters of Rudolfine Prague, with their agenda to catalogue each wonder of nature and science. Not for Barry Kirk, however, is there an appeal in the exotic. On the contrary, like the pre-Raphaelites, he is drawn more to the everyday and homely - observed in familiar settings, in gardens, hedgerows, along country footpaths and in the corners of fields.

'Animated with the effervescence of living things,' Kirk's oils re-live, as Richard Mabey has put it, 'the whole tradition of European nature painting... recast with a profoundly modern eye,' liberating the artist's subjects as much as 'containing' them, adding ecological respect to the business of capturing the image, with its built-in assumptions about the superiority of the human viewer: a link here perhaps with the unassuming romanticism of the native British tradition, a care for roots and beginnings apparent, for instance, in the work of artists such as Paul Nash and David Jones.

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