Tag: painter

Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

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excerpt

For the first time since he’d been a kid, Ken had no deadlines or other
people’s needs to accommodate. He could sit, smoke and enjoy the flavours
of the sea air, the sound of the gulls, the calm mornings filled with a distant
hum of passing cars filtering down from the Old Island Highway. The
constant rhythm of waves on the pebble beach soothed him as he read late
into the night. The mental kinks slowly started to release.
The luxury of pursuing my thoughts in an academic fashion, waking
when I chose and stopping when I liked was heaven. Initially I was
spinning from Karen’s rejection and had to regiment my mind or the
pain would have driven me crazy. The pain was still there, but now I
was no longer hiding from my thoughts and I took pleasure in the way
one thought could morph into something else incredibly interesting,
but totally unrelated.
We humans fancy that we have evolved this elevated thing called
‘reason’ when compared to ‘sense’—that is, coming from the senses,
which has been developing over millions of years—reasoning is in the
kindergarten stages. When we talk of premonitions, or gut feel, that
also relates to our senses. We have survived from the beginning as
single cell organisms to this time and place, no thanks to reason, but
through our senses.
When Ken Kirkby moved to Bowser at the end of 2001, he was seeking
complete anonymity. His landlords, Ken and Jeanine Harris, were pleasant
and helpful but respectful of his desire for privacy. If Kirkby appeared in the
yard, they were quick to open a conversation, but other than that, they didn’t
intrude. Over the months, the three became friends as well as neighbours
and the Harris’s encouraged him as he established his programme to gain
back his health.
Ken Harris had retired from a high-pressure career in Vancouver. He
was a physically active person, who kept an eye on the community and
occupied his enquiring mind through study. He enjoyed engaging Kirkby
in conversations, which bordered on debates, and ranged far and wide. As
spring approached and the weather warmed, the two Kens would sit together
in the morning sipping their coffee, and sharing Kirkby’s cigarettes (Harris
claimed he had given up smoking) while discussing whatever surfaced …

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Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

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excerpt

years old, they were taken south and lost to their families as they were given
an education that could not be applied to their northern way of life.
The soft voice of the Grandmother ended the story by saying, “Perhaps
it would be good to have Isumataq.”
Isumataq, Ken learned, also meant many things—big, or spokesperson—
but the most accurate definition seemed to be “an object or a person in
whose presence wisdom might reveal itself.”
This was the exact point at which he discovered the meaning of his
life in Canada—the unknown purpose for which he’d embarked on this
mysterious and gruelling quest.
The idea that wisdom was a thing that existed on its own and could
only show its value if one was prepared to allow that to happen, was
electrifying. I felt a driving urgency to gather as much information
as possible—a burning need to disseminate that knowledge to those
who could not otherwise experience it for themselves. I had a definable
purpose.
The time came when the Grandmother took Ken aside. She sat on the
floor in front of him and pronounced, “In our mind you are Inuk. You are
learning our language and eating our food and you are a part of us. Our wish
is that you will stay with us, but you tell us that you have to go back to your
world, and that is as it must be. It is our wish that you tell the people in your
world of the many things you have seen—all of the things you know.”
And that was when Ken made the promise to the Grandmother that
would shape, drive and guide him for the next thirty plus years of his life.
I felt I was equipped with the knowledge of something unique. The
spirit of Isumataq had become a living thing in my heart! And as an
artist I had absorbed stunning material at the cellular level. It would
never leave me.
By his own calculations, Ken spent thirty-one years, several million
dollars, ended a marriage and lost numerous friends to his fixation on
keeping his promise to bring the story of the desperate plight of these
indigenous peoples to the 90% of Canadians who lived, totally unaware, in
the southern portion of the nation.

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CB8W4CG

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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sexual gratification of a bunch of perverts. If this happened to your family,
wouldn’t you want someone to care? Wouldn’t you want someone to
raise a stink? Wouldn’t you want someone to help? That’s all I’m trying
to do. Apparently, to my surprise, it seems this painting was the two by
four needed to apply to the side of your head to get you to pay attention.
My job is to announce to you what has gone on and what continues to
go on. I’m robbing you of your innocence. I’m not going to give you the
chance to say, ‘If only I had known’. Now you know. What are you going
to do about it?”
The mood of the public changed. People began calling to agree with
him. Battle lines were drawn and half – or perhaps even the magic fiftyone
percent – agreed with him.
Ken spent an hour or more each day, at the Columbus Centre, talking
to people who lined up to see the painting and talk to the artist. Thousands
of people came – far more than had attended his opening night.
Ken finished each of his stories with a plea for help. He urged people
not to simply believe his stories, but to investigate and make up their own
minds. And if they discovered that what he said was true, let the government
know how they felt. This was what democracy was about – and he
was appalled at how lightly most people took the democracy they lived in.
“No one that is born here really takes it seriously,” he told them. “Do you
know how many rivers of blood were spilled to have what we have here?
How can we pretend to be this thing that we say we are when you can’t
bother to inform yourselves about what goes on in your own country?
How can you be a nation without knowing what goes on in your own
backyard?”
Ken received a phone call from Wayne Morrison, the executive director
of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting and the stepson of Northrop
Frye. Could they meet, he asked? Ken invited him to the studio.
Wayne was a dapper and polished gentleman who expressed fascination
with the furor caused by the flag painting. The CBC was about to
suffer large financial cuts, which would seriously endanger its existence,
he said, and he wanted Ken’s help. He wanted to reproduce the flag painting
in full page magazine advertisements with Ken standing beside it
holding a paintbrush with the quote, “I haven’t been this mad in twenty
years.” Below that would be the story of the CBC cutbacks.
Ken said yes, but he was not prepared to use the painting. He would
create another similar one instead. When Diane asked why, he said, “I’m
going to give it to Canada and I don’t want it reproduced. It’s going to go
to the country pure.”
“You’re going to give it away? Good lord, we don’t have enough money to
do what we’re doing and you’re going to give paintings away! Why are you
going to give something to the government? They already take too much!”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562830

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

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The Promise that Propelled a Life
“But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…”
(Robert Frost, Poet)
~~
Ken worked at a number of jobs on the lower mainland but never gave up
his fixation on the north. It is unlikely his sense of destiny remotely hinted
that the path he was on would directly consume thirty years and several
fortunes, the majority of which would be spent in one of the major cities of
the world. It was enough that his mind was filled with his dream of this vast
and empty land.
Many thousands of Canadians made their home in Vancouver and
environs, and it frustrated him that he’d not found anyone who had been to
the Arctic, or even expressed more than a passing interest in that inaccessible
land that made up one-third of Canada.
The city was not a good fit for him, and within a year, he was leaving
it behind. He worked for several seasons on the construction of the WAC
Bennett Dam at Hudson’s Hope—an experience that has stood him in
good stead both through the workplace challenges he met, and the lasting
connection he made with WAC Bennett himself.
This odd association resulted in a piece of useful advice offered during
Ken’s long battle on behalf of the Inuit. The Premier of British Columbia
recommended that if all else failed, Ken should practice “Legislation by
exhaustion—the last man standing wins.” Over the years, Ken found it fit
his style admirably.
While working in Hudson’s Hope, he fell in love with a beautiful First
Nations girl and crumbled in broken-hearted despair when she was taken in
a tragic accident on the eve of their wedding. Tormented and withdrawn, he
took refuge in the compelling images imprinted into his brain by Francisco’s
tales of the Canadian northland. These seemed to offer some promise of
respite and became the catalyst that drove him into the Arctic. By the time
he was twenty-five, he had lived several years with the Inuit and travelled
by foot, boat and dogsled from Coppermine, NWT to Baffin Island and
back. In the process, he gave his promise to an Inuit grandmother …

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562902

Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

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lobsters and many varieties of fish. Francisco would light a fire on the
rocky floor and the smoke would rise through the gap overhead while
we prepared a feast. Monsieur Desjardines thought this secluded spot
was heaven. We’d spend the day fishing, eating lobster over an open
fire and sharing stories. There was something deliciously daring about
being in a place feared by the locals—if the weather blew up a storm,
as it could easily do, the magical hiding spot could well become a
watery tomb.
Ken’s young life was idyllic but Portugal was changing. At the close
of three decades in power, the once-benevolent dictatorship of Antonio
de Oliveria Salazar was losing favour. In an effort to maintain control as
opposition coalesced behind the dissident Henrique Galvoa, Salazar’s
secret police grew more and more vicious, and by 1956, the country was
under siege.
Lisbon was the kind of city that attracted unusual people: the brilliant,
the demonic and those who drifted on the fringes of society. Spies abounded.
Ordinary people were recruited to inform on their friends and neighbours,
and paid according to the value of their information. Many innocent people
were ruined and the ensuing chaos heightened Ken’s determination to get
himself and his family out of the country.
Although his employees revered Kirkby, Sr. his position as a major
industrialist was unpopular with the authorities. It was no secret he had ties
with the exiled Galvoa. The contents of their ongoing correspondence was
less public and this was a double-edged sword: the Salazar supporters were
suspicious of his connection with the agitator, but totally unaware of the
extent to which Kirkby, Sr. was being kept apprised of problems brewing
within the country.
By early 1957, the Kirkby business empire was showing signs of
imploding under the intensified attentions of the secret service. Sixteen-year-
old Ken had an extensive network of friends at all social levels. When
he realised that time was running out for his dad he managed, with their
help, to orchestrate his father’s escape via a private plane in the gloom of an
early morning with government enforcers hard on their heels.
Monsieur Desjardines arranged the necessary paperwork for Kirkby, Sr.
to enter Canada. However, it took many months and the official intervention

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CB8W4CG

Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

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I’m aware that you are frequently faced with idiots and liars and
scoundrels but, in telling this story, I hope to explain that I am none of these
things. You need to know there are people in this world who actually do
give their entire lives to something bigger than themselves.”
“We have an hour,” she replied.
Fifty-nine minutes later, Ken had told the story of Isumataq and of the
cause of the Inuit. “That’s the preamble—now here’s the paperwork,” he
said, sliding neat folders of material across the table to her. “Here’s how the
money came in and here’s how it went out. For myself, I’ve always lived a
Spartan life. I’ve no real interest in possessions or material things. Money is
simply a necessary tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver—or a paintbrush.”
Some time later the Judge looked up and announced, “You don’t owe
a penny, Mr. Kirkby.”
“I know. If I did, I would pay it.”
When he emerged from the meeting, Ken felt as though his feet were
gliding above the rain-washed pavement. It had been worth the battle and
his sense of justification made him giddy. Karen was out of town again, but
when he phoned to share the good news, her bitter response was “Well, I
guess rules just don’t apply to you.”
He spent the evening in company with his long-time friend and fishing
buddy, Ron Gruber. Since Ken’s return to Vancouver, Ron had watched his
friend’s relationship deteriorate. He was increasingly concerned as he saw
Ken slide steadily into that solitary and dark place from which there seems
no escape. Ron was one of the few people in the world Ken could talk to
about personal matters and he told him of his concern that Karen seemed
determined to alienate her colleagues. As he put it, “It’s like watching
someone you care for deeply move dangerously close to the edge of the
cliff, and there’s no way to save her.” He harkened back to earlier situations
when Karen had set herself on collision course, and then dragged others
with her into disaster.
It was not Ken’s nature to give up without a fight, and it took several
months more before he would accept the end of their relationship. He’d
committed to change his life for Karen and he meant to do everything
humanly possible to retrieve the closeness he’d once had with her. But even
that steely resolve wilted when, before leaving on another business trip,
Karen voiced her opinion that they had nothing whatsoever in common…

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CB8W4CG

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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A painting that goes in hockey arenas, that is toured across the country
from one end to the other, telling the story.
Then a whole flood of ideas and memories came into my mind crystal
clear. Grandmother doing her dance and her song in the winter – becoming
mesmerized and overcome by heat and emotion – going outside and the
Northern Lights roaring overhead – and she came out and stood beside me
and put her arm in mine and told me that those were the spirits of her ancestors
dancing. And she sensed the difficulties I was having over the loss of the
two women that I had loved so profoundly. She had said, “It’s a good thing
to let them go and dance”.
During her song and her story, there had been the need of an Isumataq
– a person or an object in whose presence wisdom might show itself. The
painting would be called Isumataq. And the dream driving all of this was
Nunavut.
That was the moment in which the whole thing exploded in one clear vision.
It must have been working quietly in my brain all this time and now
here it was – all together. Now it poured out and it all came together like a
jigsaw puzzle – every piece moved into its proper slot.
Covered in sweat, Ken’s body shook with nervous energy. His whole
being thrilled and he felt himself to be outside his body – completely
outside space and time. The vision was so clear, so compelling, that it
possessed him. He knew it would come to own him – night and day – and
he didn’t care. He gave himself up to it. He paced back and forth, details
of Isumataq whirling in his mind and dropping into place like numbers
on a slot machine.
He drove home that night with a new excitement coursing through
him. When he told Marsha he was going to create a giant painting on
the scale of the Sistine Chapel, she smiled and shook her head. In the
morning he told Diane who began to plan a studio renovation to accommodate
such an enormous painting. While they were hunched over the
sketch, Salvador appeared in the doorway, a bottle of brandy in his hand,
and a smile on his face.
“I have the equipment, the idea, the staff, and the availability of rock.
How would you like a giant Inukshuk in your studio?”
Three days later, Salvador pulled up in a new Saab, followed by a flatbed
truck – groaning under the weight of massive blocks of granite – and
two extended cab pickups loaded with burly men. At two in the morning,
after hours of heavy labour, a seven-foot tall Inukshuk towered over
the studio. Salvador waved his arm at it like a magician wielding a wand.
“There. Is it to your liking?”
“It’s perfect,” Ken said.
Salvador’s next project was an Inukshuk at the Columbus Centre!
Dragging Ken and Joseph Carrier to the lobby, he gestured grandly…

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Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

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she was pregnant with his child when she died.
Jessica came into his life a number of years later when he was
working in northern British Columbia. Again, a woman on the fringes of
acceptable society, she was wise, beautiful, self-reliant, and she loved him
unconditionally. Ken met her through her brother, Patrick, with whom he
worked. They were First Nations people filled with the pride of their early
ancestors. There is a saying that home is where the heart is, and Ken found
Jessica’s cozy log house in the ranch country the closest thing to a home that
he’d ever experienced. The lovers spent blissful months together planning
their wedding. It was one of the happiest times in his life.
The perverse hand of Fate nearly destroyed him when Jessica and
Patrick were killed in a horrific accident on icy, winter roads. The pickup
was still burning when Ken arrived at the scene, his last hope extinguished
when, through the shattered window of the burnt out vehicle he recognized
the sleeve of Jessica’s buckskin coat, the mate to the one he was wearing.
The traumatic image of the fiery wreck haunted his dreams long after, and
virtually drove him into the Arctic seeking some form of peace.
On his return from the years spent in the Arctic, Ken entered into
a comfortable relationship with Helen. She was a settled, intelligent
schoolteacher who appeared to support his drive to re-establish himself
as a painter within the Vancouver art scene. He was not the first man to
marry under the mistaken belief that his woman accepted his stipulation
that fatherhood was not in his plans. Ken clearly understood the depth of
his own drive and focus and believed that, consumed as he was to right the
wrong that had been done to the Inuit, he had nothing left over to give a
child. But he had not reckoned with the determination of a woman bent on
motherhood.
When Michael was born, Ken was immediately captivated by this tiny
bundle of human life. Torn between wonderment and reality, he knew that
his kind of obsessive dedication to the northern problem left little time for
the sort of nurturing his own father had given him. What was done could
never be undone however, and Ken did his best to provide for his family
both financially and emotionally. Things proceeded relatively smoothly for
a handful of years, although Ken never quite trusted Helen in the same way
he had before the unexpected pregnancy. Happily though, over the years, he
and Michael crafted a wonderfully strong, mutual love and the young man…

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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The media continued to be fascinated by him, the way an audience is
mesmerized by a performer who embarrasses himself inadvertently, on
a talk show. Ken had stepped so far outside the boundaries, had put on
a show so over the top, right down to the Inuksuit painted on the streets,
that the media haunted his studio just to see what would happen next. Ken
continued to feed them quotable lines that seemed to come effortlessly to
his lips, but that he had, in fact, been practising for months and years.
But, tidbits wouldn’t feed them forever. Eventually they would want to
stop nibbling and indulge in another meal – and the next banquet would
have to be bigger and better than the last.
He met Salvador Grimaldi for lunch again at Boccacio Restaurant, in the
Columbus Centre, and once again the architect came bounding into the
room, perfectly dressed in understated, expensive clothing, his eyes sparkling,
and his smile spreading goodwill around the room. Ken had a plan.
He told him that his next project had to be an even larger success than
the last, and described the two immense paintings he was currently working
on: one was a sixteen by sixteen foot canvas, featuring an Inukshuk set
against an enormous white cloud, that was intended for the Reichmanns.
Why the Reichmanns? Salvador asked.
“They are a very prominent family which the media and the public
have become very interested in,” Ken said. “They’re secretive and almost
impossible to approach. I’ve been studying them, and the information is
very sparse. I know they spent time in Valencia after leaving Eastern Europe,
and then they spent time in Morocco, and then from Morocco they
moved to Toronto: they started a tile business that immediately turned
into a raging success. Then, they went into high-end real estate development,
in which they have achieved even greater success. They are an
intriguing family – and just what I need. I need a Lorenzo de Medici.”
“I want to get to a place where other people cannot go. I want to sell
a painting to a man who doesn’t buy paintings and see it hung in the
foyer of the tallest building in the British Commonwealth – and have that
become a media event – even though they don’t like the media, that is
what I am after. What do you know about the Reichmanns that you feel
comfortable passing on to me? I get the idea you’re pretty close to them.”
Salvador allowed that he was close to Albert Reichmann, who preferred
to be called Mr. Albert. He had done his corporate landscaping and was
currently working on his personal property. “He’s a prince,” Salvador said.
“A merchant prince. He is a man of many talents, and I find it interesting
that you would have, instinctively, known that.’
Ken took Salvador to the studio to see the Reichmann and Yellowknife
Airport paintings, in progress. When he unlocked the door and switched
on the bank of lights, Salvador froze. The larger painting was nearing
completion while the other was only half finished.

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

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Warriors Come in Many Shapes
“We all grow up with the weight of history on us.
Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they
do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.”
(Shirley Abbott, Writer)
~~
Ken Kirkby inherited genes from a thousand years of determined and
intelligent men and the clever women who worked beside them. In each
generation, the face of the world inhabited by his ancestors was left
improved. If he feels some pressure to leave his own imprint on his world,
he chooses to do so by inspiring others as he has been inspired; by restoring
what has been spoiled and by righting what is wrong. Justice is an important
word in his vocabulary.
His father, Ken Kirkby, Sr. turned his back on both a fortune and his
influential British steel family as a young man. He left his assured place
in Britain to make a successful life in Australia and eventually returned to
England with a reputation for a sound ability to turn failing companies into
profitable ventures. With World War II on the horizon, he was seconded by
Winston Churchill’s team to transform the venerable but struggling Rover
Motor Company into an efficient, profit-making war machine.
In 1938, he met and married Ken’s mother, Louise May Chesney. Her
father was a respected Spanish industrialist whose family traced their roots
back to Rurik of the Rus, a Dane whose history was recorded in written
form in 746 AD. Ken was born in 1940 and his sister three years later. The
Kirkby and Chesney families left recession strapped Britain for Spain in
1946 and the Kirkby family ultimately settled in the Portuguese village of
Parede, a coastal village south of Lisbon. Their neighbours were diplomats
or professional elite, but Ken’s father preferred to do his own gardening and
knew the children of all his employees by their first names.
Ken’s childhood was unorthodox by any measure. Their family home
on the Avenue of Princes welcomed many of the brightest minds of the
European world at the time, but he ran barefoot with the Gypsy kids, bartered
his drawings in the marketplace and escaped his mother’s restrictions

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CB8W4CG