The Terrible Unreality of Richard A. Kirk

Canadian artist Richard A. Kirk is a weaver of oneiric art. His patchwork black and white images often convey a sense of unreality so thorough that they put one in mind of viewing some journal of dreamscapes from the past. His work as an illustrator has brought him into giving imagery to the words of several prominent horror writers like China Mieville and Poppy Z. Brite. This is very appropriate, since Kirk's art easily seeps across the border from the surreal to the weird. His website lays out further description about his life and artistic techniques:

Richard A. Kirk is a prolific Canadian visual artist and illustrator. His fine art work is centered on images that explore the liminal space between imagination and reality; a pictorial space where a personal iconography manifests in protean forms that challenge conventional notions of the beautiful and the grotesque. Richard is interested in the forms found in nature, the morphology of plants and animals, and the effect of time on materials. Richard works in a number of mediums including: pen and ink, silverpoint, watercolor, and oil. He also works with found materials such as metal, rust, rubber, fossils, bones and text. Richard is represented in Europe by Strychnin Gallery.

Kirk's horrors, though they are not ghosts, hold a very spectral quality. The leafy strangeness of the library entity or the giant spider crawling out of an archive drawer above possess a light and tenuous existence, even in the world of art. The description from Kirk's site quoted also reveals some important glimmers of understanding into the nature of the artist's themes and style. It doesn't take long to notice that the haunted objects of oddness in Kirk's pieces are either indifferent or unconcerned with the strange happenings. They are not shocked, frightened, or disgusted. In some respects, this response (or lack thereof) stresses the unusual terror in Kirk's works. The lack of surprise at being confronted with strange happenings indicates things are not as they seem in the whole environment sketched by Kirk--his worlds are the transitory dreamworlds, or darker places where easy definitions of reality are not made.


This zone of unreality is a murky region, but one that lies firmly within the weird--placing Richard A. Kirk there as well, whether he is aware of it or not. The queer denizens of Kirk's artistic dreamland identify him as one of the most imaginative talents worthy of wider recognition in the community of weird admirers. His work has appeared in several art books, including Art That Creeps: Gothic Fantasies and the Macabre in Contemporary Art (which houses a full section on his ghostly wonders). Kirk's website, which includes a far more comprehensive gallery of airy frights than the one featured here, is also well worth a visit.

-Grim Blogger