NEAR BOWSER, VANCOUVER ISLAND - Ken Kirkby made his artistic reputation by using big brush strokes, including painting Isumataq, a sprawling Arctic landscape 152 feet long and 12 feet high that was billed as the largest painting in the world when it was unveiled in Parliament, in 1992. So when his personal life began to fall apart, it wasn't surprising that the disaster took on epic proportions.
In a few short weeks, his live-in relationship with a woman he adored collapsed, he had a bitter falling out with his best friend, a trusted art dealer told him his work was starting to suck - and then he was diagnosed with cancer.
One morning he got up determined to leave it all behind and start again. Three years ago the 64-year-old artist, who was based in Toronto before he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia a decade ago to be closer to the fly fishing he loves, vanished from sight.
Rumors spread through the fly fishing and artistic communities, where he was best known, that he had gone away to die.
But as it turns out, he went away to start living again. "I just woke up, saw what a hell my life had become, and asked myself, where, in all the world, would I like to be? I thought of Bowser because I came salmon fishing here in summers past, and I always loved it. So I got in my truck, drove to the ferry, and just started looking for a place to live."
Bowser is a tiny community in British Columbia, on the East Coast of Vancouver Island, between Nanaimo and Courtenay. It is such a small place that if there wasn't a sign on the road announcing your arrival, you'd drive through it without noticing.
But it is on the map for West Coast fly fishermen, who know that the estuaries hold sea-run cutthroat, there are good trout lakes back in the mountains, and the beaches offer some of the finest coho fishing, found anywhere, in the late fall. Summer and winter you can fish along the kelp beds for coho or chinook salmon. In short, if you are a fly fisherman, it is paradise.
"I just started asking people if they knew of a place to rent. I got passed around and pretty soon, I found this," says Mr. Kirkby, throwing back his head and laughing.
Sitting in a plastic lawn chair outside the front door of his beach front cottage, Mr. Kirkby, recently back from the grave, holds up his arms to the landscape. "Just look at this place," he said. "It's marvelous."
Spread in front of his small, one-bedroom cottage is a stone and gravel beach that might have come from one of his Arctic landscapes. Backdropping the gray, speckled beach is a bright blue sea. And beyond are the green and gold humps of some of the northern Gulf Islands. In the far distance, seen through a haze, are the dark blue Coast Mountains on the British Columbia Mainland. The cottage is so close to the water he hears the sound of waves day and night.
"I fell out of hell and landed in heaven," says Mr. Kirkby, who on this fall day looks so tanned and fit it is hard to believe he was twice operated on for cancer a year ago.
"I had skin cancer and when I went in to have it removed, they found something more. Inside the skull," he says, shrugging. "They operated. Didn't get it all. Operated again. They say it's all gone now. We'll see." As if to underscore his mortality, or his trust in fate, Mr. Kirkby ends the medical briefing by lighting a cigarette.
After two years in relative seclusion, Mr. Kirkby is emerging once again. He agreed to an interview recently, on the understanding that his exact location not be revealed. Identifying his home, as "near Bowser" would be OK, he said, because that takes in a lot of coastline and his house is hidden from view, at the end of an unmarked driveway. You can only find him with detailed instructions that require you to drive on the wrong side of the road as you approach.
Mr. Kirkby said he fell in love with the place the moment he saw it and somehow convinced the owner, who'd never rented out the cottage before, that a crazy artist would be a good first tenant.
The next day he went home to Vancouver, packed up and moved, apparently burning as many personal bridges behind him as he possibly could. His common law relationship was over, his closest friendship was finished, and he'd resigned as a director of the Steelhead Society, a fisheries conservation group he'd long supported, often by donating original art that was coveted at fundraising dinners. "When I first came here, I decided I wanted to rebuild my life completely," he said of his break with the past.
"One of the things I did was change all my routines. If I usually got up and had an orange juice and a cup of coffee, I just stopped doing it. Everything had to change."
In effect he was rewiring his brain as part of his renewal process. He stopped painting too, after an art dealer had told him bluntly: "Ken, you're trying too hard and the art is suffering." For six months he didn't pick up a brush. And he didn't miss it. But slowly, the desire came back. "It was the landscape," he said. "It is just so staggering. The rocks are big, the trees are big, the sea is big. It was inspiring."
His art studio is in a net shed, a big, barn-like structure that sits nearby on the waterfront. The building is now used for general storage, not for nets, but there is a small space above that the owner said he could use.
Pushing open the trap door that leads to his studio ("I have to keep it closed to keep the otters out.") he reveals what's happened since he began painting again. Propped on the walls are canvases exploring the landscapes of his new life. There are moody islands, big eagles, bright commercial fishing boats, dark forests and moving seas. One series depicts some old, abandoned farms he found while exploring the offshore islands in a small aluminum boat. There are some things reminiscent of the Arctic landscapes he's famous for - the sweeping sky and the detailed texture of the stones for example - but there is clearly a departure in style here. Many of his Arctic pieces, in which a stone Inukshuk usually plays a dominant role, were stark. But there is a new warmth in the canvases on the wall in the boat shed.
Told it may be his best work ever, Mr. Kirkby shrugs. "Well, it's more peaceful than anything I've ever done before. And I'm certainly at the happiest in my life, so maybe that's reflected in there too." Mr. Kirkby said that when his life imploded he decided to actively pursue something he'd long desired but had never had before. "I wanted a private life," he said. "Since I was eight (when his family made it clear big things were expected of him) until I was 60, I'd never lived a life for me. So this, finally, is it. "And I can't believe how much I'm enjoying it. "Now when I get up in the morning it's because I want to. Not because I have responsibilities that have to be met. I get up because I have things I can't wait to do."
The life Mr. Kirkby has reconstructed for himself revolves around his painting, which he does everyday, his wine making, a passion that he brags has made him the biggest bootlegger in Bowser, and his fly fishing. This fall he had a spotty season. The coho run was sporadic, but the fish that he did find were epic.
"The coho weren't here in big numbers but Jesus they were huge. One day I had six coho I just couldn't stop. They all went way into the backing before getting off. Finally I got one to the boat, it was 18 pounds. A fellow rowed in next to me and took one of 22 pounds."
It made the season for him. Most evenings during the summer and fall, he is on the watch through the windows of his studio, or from just outside his cottage door, where he likes to rest in the sun.
"I sit here with my binoculars," he says, leaning back in his lawn chair, looking out over the shoreline, "and just watch for the salmon. When I see them finning along the beach, I wander down with my fly rod and start casting." One day an art dealer from New York came for a visit. Mr. Kirkby arrived at the dinner table in the small cottage wearing his waders and carrying a fishing rod.
"Do you usually dress like that for dinner?" asked the bewildered dealer. "When the salmon are running, yes," said Mr. Kirkby. As he recounts the story, before they had finished cocktails, he spied a salmon jumping, excused himself from the table, waded in and caught a 10-lb coho - which they then dined on.
"He went back to New York thinking I was living in the Wild West, where you have to forage for your meals," said Mr. Kirkby. The art dealer had sought him out because of rumors that spread, after his sudden disappearance, that Mr. Kirkby was dying from brain cancer. He went away demanding more art from the very much living artist.
Mr. Kirkby laughs about the calls he got from people wondering if he was dead yet. "I don't know how that got around because I was hardly talking to anybody. I was pretty much in seclusion here, " he said.
Some people have suggested he spread the rumors himself, just to drive up the price of his art. Mr. Kirkby smiles at the idea and shakes his head as if to say he can't believe anyone would believe him capable of such mischievousness. "I've been too busy reinventing my life to stage my own death," he says.
Editor’s Note: To see a collection or to buy some of Ken Kirkby's paintings, visit the Qualicum Frameworks art gallery, in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. Or go to the gallery web site at: http://www.qualicumframeworks.com/
