page_title: Vance Kirkland
section_title: Periods
hierarchical_section_title: Vance Kirkland / Career / Periods
caption_attribution_description: “Experience of Mysteries in Space”, 1973, oil paint and water on linen, by Vance Kirkland.
context_page_description: Vance Hall Kirkland was a painter and educator in Denver, Colorado. His paintings, from 1926 to 1981, range from realist and impressionist watercolors, to surrealist deadwood worlds, to abstract expressionist mixtures of oil paint and water to richly textured dot paintings in oil. Commenting on Kirkland’s works from 1954 to 1981, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Lóránd Hegyi, stated, “... in his later work, he developed a visionary art which mystically empathized with the entire universe, gave cosmic universality visual form in explosive images and used panel painting to convey the perpetually changing state of the universe.” After his death Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art was founded in his name.
context_section_description: Kirkland created about 1,200 paintings during his lifetime, spanning 5 painting periods and more than 30 series.  In the catalog for his 1978 retrospective exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, Kirkland said, “It has been absolutely necessary for me to change directions in order to avoid repetition. Whenever a cycle of ideas seemed satisfactory, I knew I had done that and needed to move on and develop a greater challenge. Then the paintings remained fresh and were, I hoped, improved, and I avoided boredom.”
  One of the most important observations about Kirkland’s career, made by museum scholars as documented below, is that he created something significant in each of his five painting periods.  When his works were given exhibitions at 11 European museums and 2 exhibition halls, from 1997 to 2000, each of those 13 shows included all 5 of Kirkland's periods, ranging from the 1930s to the late 1970s.
  1.  Designed Realism (1926–1944): Vance Kirkland’s first painting period, Designed Realism, consists of mostly watercolor and some oil paint. Lewis Sharp, Denver Art Museum Director, and former Curator, Metropolitan Museum, New York, stated, “…he handled this [watercolor] medium as well as any American artist ever has. You simply can go back and whether you want to begin with John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, or move to the 20th century with John Marin or Charles Burchfield, Vance Kirkland was a master.”  This period includes still lifes, portraits and landscapes.
  2.  Surrealism (1939–1954): For his second painting period, Kirkland used mostly watercolor (also some gouache, casein, egg tempera and oil paint). He invented surrealist worlds of deadwood morphing into whimsical creatures, which dwarf pre-historic humans, scampering among the vegetation. Charles Stuckey, Curator of 20th Century Painting and Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago, commented, “...they show a virtuosity in his control of shape and transparency with the watercolor medium, that enables him to do in watercolor what artists like [René] Magritte and [Salvador] Dalí would be doing in oil at the same time...”
  Elizabeth Broun, Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, further discussed this period: “I find in his surrealist works a charming willingness to contemplate nature as a positive force and evolution as a series of potentials.  I think it comes out later in the nebula and dot paintings which give a sense of explosions in space.  It’s a release of energy as a magnificent act of creation.” “Some of his landscapes have proto-creatures, little animal forms and shapes, biomorphic, evolutionary beings.  These sometimes include more or less recognizable little humanoid figures.  You sense that he is putting man in his place in nature, showing him as just one of the potential evolutionary paths nature might have taken.  It’s Kirkland’s way of reducing man back to the scale he may have felt was appropriate.” 
  3.  Hard Edge Abstraction/Abstractions from Nature (1947–1957): For his third painting period, Kirkland mostly did hard-edge painting in an abstract way. About half of these paintings are watercolor, half oil. This period includes the Timberline Abstraction series [example from 1953 shown above]. Charles Stuckey analyzed part of this period: “There is a sense of labyrinth about his line, for example, that is obvious in these timberline abstract paintings—which are ostensibly developed from his meditations on leaves that he would see on the forest floor....some of the early attempts by him to achieve texture look like that wood grain that would obsess him and appear in everything, that one would associate with a table top, then with a sort of still life arranged on it, but a still life that went away and only left these incredible tracings.”
  4.  Abstract Expressionism (1950–1964): For his fourth painting period, Kirkland invented an abstract expressionist technique of mixing oil paint and water together, creating painting surfaces different than any other artist. Richard Brettell, Director, Dallas Museum of Art, discus
caption: Experience of Mysteries in Space, 1973, oil paint and water on linen, by Vance Kirkland.
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