Richard A. Kirk : IPMM Exclusive Interview

Richard Kirk

“I want to show you something in a way you may never have thought to see it before.”

One of the first thoughts that usually comes to mind when ingesting art by people like Richard Kirk, is: What aliens borrowed this dude? Where did they take him? And, what did he see to be able to produce these scenes?!?! My next thought in this particular instance was, either way, this guy is a genius. With hybrids and half-castes abound, it’s hard to synthesize the ideas proposed by this intrepid traveler…but it’s been a pleasure reaching into his reality.

As amoeba’s from cross-hatched globes trickle in and out of Richard’s consciousness, it’s clear to me that the boundless realm of possibilities he employs, are exactly what draw me to his work. In a world so polarized by rigidity and dichotomy, it’s relieving to know there are still people lost in the constructs of their creativity; influenced by a personal history, and a few important lynch pins. Richard Kirk delves into images for whom a linguists’ mind is insufficient. It’s that synaptic double-take that pulls me in – as in, what is this thing anyway? Amidst the confusion that ensues in still shots of organism’s and their relevant counterparts, the details of his worlds’ are yet to be revealed. Fortunately, those of us who are commonly captured by the mulishness of our minds, have routine escapes from the domesticity of daily thought patterns, and for that, we should be grateful. Go ahead and check out the parameters of Richard Kirk’s imagination; I think it’s nestled somewhere between previous lives and future psyche’s, but neither of us are quite sure where exactly.

by Evan La Ruffa

EL: What do you make of the healthcare debate going on in the us? How is it being framed in Canada?…Yee who hails from a nation with a rational stance on this issue…

RK: I don’t really have an opinion on US healthcare. In our media health care in the US is usually treated as a cautionary tale. From a Canadian perspective though, I have to say that when one is bent over in pain, it is sure nice to know it’s all covered financially.

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EL: How about art in Canada…is it supported and thriving? I’d assume you guys aren’t cutting music and art curriculum’s in schools like we are in the states…but then again, maybe I have a romanticized view of Canadian social values.

RK: I tend to be focused on my own work and working with a small network of other creative people, but from what I can see there is amazing creativity in Canada. I just finished a great show with The Shadowood Collective. But if the art scene is thriving it’s because the artists are making it happen out of a love of what they are doing. I am not sure there are many artists making a living doing it though. You usually end up in a related job like teaching or working in media. I think artists tend to get their energy from other artists and less so from publicly funded support. I honestly don’t think of art in terms of geography. The web has made connecting with other creative people so easy that physical location becomes secondary.

EL: When a buddy of mine took a look at your work, he said “nice and twisted.” Which is quite similar to the thoughts I had when I 1st saw your work. What words do you tend to use to describe your art to someone who hasn’t seen it yet?

RK: I was watching an interview with David Foster Wallace recently, and when asked by an interviewer if he thought his novels were funny, he said he had set out to write a sad book and the humor was something he wasn’t really aware of until readers commented on it. It is much the same with me when people say my work is twisted or strange. Although I take that as a compliment, when I am working I am trying to create something beautiful. In doing so I don’t want to rely on things that are stereotypically beautiful. It’s odd that when I search for analogies I immediately turn to literature. If you take someone like John Banville, and look at the way he describes very unsettling things, it’s unexpected, but you say, yes, that is exactly right. The language he uses is poetic. That’s what I want to do with a drawing. I want to show you something in a way you may never have thought to see it before. Rather than using words, I use forms in a very fluid and protean way.

Botanica

EL: There is an enchanted, dream-like aura about your illustrations. How do you come to develop the various characters? Is it an automatic writing type of process, or do you concoct creatures that arise from a larger back story that has arisen in your mind?

RK: The characters come of their own volition. I start drawing and they emerge. That is what it feels like anyway. Over the past few years there is a sense that they come from the same place. It feels like a world I am slowly revealing one image at a time. When I am working I build the image almost like a still-life tableau. When I create a central narrative for an image, it is usually through a dominant character, then as I add in other characters relationships start to form and influences are imposed. Over time a personal iconography has emerged. My work always involves themes of memory, the unconscious, natural history and literature. These are concerns that are very important to me as an artist. I know it’s a lot to ask in this day and age but my goal is to keep the viewer’s attention with the hope that they will explore the image in depth. I am not creating art to be taken in at a glance. There is no cynical punch line or easy pay off, it’s meant to be read like a story, but one that engages not only my imagery but also the viewers own memories and life experiences. I like that you raised the idea of enchantment. That is very much what I am trying to do, create an enchantment.

EL: You’ve done covers for Clive Barker, how do you like affixing your art to someone else’s narrative?

RK: I’m not by nature an illustrator. The work I do is far too idiosyncratic and specific for that. But the irony is that I have illustrated a number of books. I think I have been able to do this successfully because the writers, publishers and musicians I have worked with have engaged me because they like that specific thing I am doing. They tend to be extremely creative people themselves and understand that to put limitations on the process will result in a less successful result. Clive has an incredibly creative mind and is therefore open to ideas in a way someone with less of an antenna for that kind of thing would be. I am proud of the work I’ve done for Clive, Caitlin Kiernan, Korn, and others. In every case they have given me unquestioned freedom to do what I do. I have a number of cool illustration projects on the horizon, a big project involving Clive (which I must remain mum on for now), a collaboration called The Grand Lie, with Tim and Elizabeth Mizelle, which will be co-illustrated with amazing ink artist John Pierro, and finally my own novella, Lost Machine.

Anteater

EL: Wow! Onward Richard! Great to hear man…I guess it makes sense to then ask…the content of your work seems to reveal a reverence for some type of fictional and outlandish world, do you read fiction?

RK: I have always been a voracious reader. If I am not reading I just feel weird, like I am not dressed. Usually I have several books going at once. My work is absolutely influenced by literature. When I am working I like to layer meaning, and allusion. I’ve already given a couple of clues to the kind of books I like, but some other favorites are people like Mervyn Peake, John Crowley and Nabokov. A book that blew my mind recently, and which I am still reading, is Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes. I could go on all day. My first questions when I am getting to know somebody usually revolve around what they are reading! I love to hear what people are reading, whether it’s John Grisham or James Joyce. If it were not for literature I would probably be a medical or natural history illustrator, or a gardener.

EL: What ideas or concepts inform the way you approach what you create?

RK: It always starts with nature. It can be a skull found under a hedge, a weird looking sprout from a vegetable on the window ledge, watching a cicada split its back and emerge in a completely different form. It can be an image of Haeckel’s or an old engraving in a 19^th century medical book. With the inspiration from these building blocks I am able to build a foundation underneath my ideas. My goal is to talk about those things that cannot be articulated with words but which can be suggested through images.

EL: I love that idea of the limitation of words. It trips me out since words are my means. But I agree that words can’t necessarily equal images…Personally, I lose track of time when I look at your work, I guess that’s really the highest compliment I can offer to any creative person…what’s a typical day in the life of Richard Kirk look like?

RK: Quite ordinary I am afraid! I get up, go to work at the university, come home and spend time with the family and make pictures until bedtime, read, fall asleep.

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EL: “Botanica” and “Long Leggers Call On What Is Required” are awesome…How do you come to create these?!?! Do you just start drawing, or have you created all these characters before and then plug them into certain situations? I only ask because there’s such cohesion from piece to piece. All of them seem to be part of the same tripped-out world…..

RK: Thanks! The only way I can describe it is that there are certain creatures that appear in my work in different guises, different shapes. My work is very much about a love of nature, time and form. Without overstating it, these creatures are manifestations of different aspects of these things. They rise up to be the embodiment of certain feelings. With Botanica and Long Leggers, as weird as the characters are, they belong to this world. Their morphology, their constituent elements are of this world, just rearranged, like words in a poem to evoke certain intangible feelings in the viewer, a spiritual experience of the plant world in one and the notion of horror and menace juxtaposed with the notion of protection in the other. On the practical drawing end of things I start with basic marks that express the ideas and then model the forms to refine the image. The detail, the texture comes from a kind of texture memory I have developed over time. Sometimes I think I am just drawing parts of an enormous single work, which will one day stand as my life’s labor.

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EL: Awesome. What pieces of yours do you like best or consider the most successful?

RK: Okay, I am going to cop out and say I like different pieces for different reasons. I like Chimera because it has passages. It’s possible to take sections of that drawing, because it’s so large, and pull out different movements. With a little Photoshop cutting and pasting you could make an entire illustrated book out of that one work. That concept of multiple movements in one work is something that I definitely want to explore in my future pieces. I also like Searching for the Breadcrumb Navigator because it nicely depicts the idea of an ordinary person beset by all manner of weirdness. It has that implicit unease but there is also a lot of humor in the piece. It makes me think of Where the Wild Things Are, in that things could go either way, hilarity or horror. Another is Sinister Games of Paperface, because that piece is about unlocking the doors to the imagination and accepting the consequences. I also have a soft spot for it because it was the first piece Jonathan Davis bought and in its way, pointed the way forward to the work I did with Korn.

EL: “The Devil’s Darning Needle” is fantastic also…what’s the concept behind that one?

The Devil's Darning Needle

RK: The term “devil’s darning needle” refers to a dragonfly. The concept of the piece is that the character has in a sense come to recognize herself as part of the fabric of her environment. I am fascinated with the idea of connectedness, where everything is part of an infinite whole in time/space. Our senses give us a sense of separateness, as though we were agents operating outside of the universe, whereas in reality, we are intimately connected. It comes from a remarkably narrow understanding of who and what we are and what is going on around us. When you think about it our understanding of the universe is very rudimentary and local. Here we are in the 21st century and we are like strangers inhabiting our own bodies.

EL: I’d love to see a collection of yours in book form. Any possibility of that happening?

RK: It is something that I will be doing through my publishing project Radiolaria Studios, maybe next year. In the meantime my work can be seen in a number of illustrated books or in the Art That Creeps book that was put together by Strychnin Gallery last year. It is a bit daunting and I’m always busy making art, but I think the time is coming for it to happen.

EL: Name one artist IPMM readers should check out.

RK: When I think back to art that really surprised me recently, the porcelain work of Canadian Artist Shary Boyle comes to mind. She creates truly unique little sculptures, which are sometimes personal and sometimes interpretations of myth. The works are aesthetically very beautiful, with birds, flowers, plants and scaly creatures. I like the juxtaposition of fragility and vision. Uncanny, is the word that keeps coming to mind. There is a clever tension between what you expect from the medium and what is revealed. The closer you get the stranger things get. The smooth glazes and metallic highlights begin to resolve into snakes, birds and gaping monsters. Boyle turns the viewer expectations inside out. I love that. It’s not unlike my use of a traditional technique like silverpoint to pursue my little phantasmagoria.