Liverpool artist returns to his roots

Jan 12 2012 Flintshire Chronicle

Painter John Kirby talks to LAURA DAVIS ahead of his exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool

There’s an ache that John Kirby gets when he thinks about Liverpool – the city he grew up in and ultimately left.

It began as a teenager when he travelled for 10 weeks to India on a rundown bus that finally conked out in Iran, forcing him to hitch-hike the rest of the way.

It continues now, long after both his parents have gone and his childhood home has been pulled down.

Nothing can quite quench it – not his success as an artist, nor revisiting the gallery that inspired him as a boy, nor allowing fond memories to wash over him.

“I’ve never quite recovered from that homesickness,” he said.

“Even though my parents are dead – God bless them – and I don’t go back to Liverpool very much, there was a terrible sense of loss when I left.

“The echo of it still remains and going back doesn’t satisfy it because, of course, that time of my childhood has all gone.”

Nevertheless, Kirby will return to the city this month for the opening of an exhibition of his work, The Living and the Dead, in the Walker Art Gallery, which he used to visit as a boy to stare at Solomon J Solomon’s Samson and The Triumph of the Innocents by William Holman Hunt.

“They’re dramatic and colourful – brilliantly done,” he said.

“And they are full of drama and big – especially when you’re a small child. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could paint like that. I still can’t, actually.”

It was in the Walker that he first encountered a naked body, other than his own. For a young Catholic boy growing up in ‘a kind of no man’s land between Old Swan and Tuebrook’ and serving as an altar boy in St Cecilia’s Church, the experience was pivotal.

“There were no Page Three girls in the 1950s or 60s, so that was where you first saw the human body,” said Kirby, whose work is collected by David Hockney.

“I remember being disturbed by it – excited and interested and guilty, all rolled into one.

“The idea of religion and sex and guilt are very much part of what I do – they’re not so much conscious things, but the subjects I choose tend to have connections with those feelings.

“What influences you very early on tends to be something that you carry right through your career.”

It would be many years before Kirby became a professional artist, exhibiting widely throughout Europe and the US, however, although he had shown an interest from a young age. He once painted his Auntie Agnes’s garden gnome so beautifully that she brought it inside and displayed it on her mantelpiece.

He left school as soon as he could, becoming a shipping clerk for American Express in India Buildings, Water Street, before working in a Catholic bookshop just around the corner from the Walker. Then, under his mother’s influence, he signed up to work in a Calcutta children’s home run by Mother Teresa.

Kirby said: “My mother said I should do something with my life because I was such a boring adolescent – chewing my comb and listening to Radio Luxembourg and being unhappy with my life.”

It was his first trip abroad and it lasted an exciting, fascinating two years, but tore a rent of homesickness in his heart that would never quite heal.

He moved back to Liverpool but didn’t stay long – instead completing a social work course in Plymouth and relocating to London to become a probation officer before, eventually, turning to art.

“I found I liked it,” he said, then pauses and appears to change his mind.

“Although I don’t know if I ever did like painting exactly.

“I’m not up at dawn and in the studio every night until midnight.”

He appears to grasp for words for a moment, then added: “It’s an extension of how you think about the world and what you think about yourself.

“It could be writing, it just happens to be painting.

“I come from a Liverpool-Irish background and what I do is tell stories. They’re not clear narratives and I don’t even know what the story is, really.”

His family features strongly in the Walker exhibition – his brothers as scrapping altar boys on a desolate beach in Lost Boys (1991) and his parents sharing an imagined final meal together in Last Supper (1984-99).

“My father lived for a long time after she died, so he’s gazing vacantly ahead,” said Kirby.

“And I always think the peas on the plate are my brothers and myself and my sister, but that’s just a little joke I have with myself.”

The Living and the Dead is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, from January 13 to April 15.