Barry Kirk

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 and in 1997 contributed to The Saxon Shore. Kirk has held one-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1997, 2001 and 2004.

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