What inspired him to do his art?

Answer 1

In 1975, Kirkland was interviewed by David McComb, and answered this question in his own words: "My father was a dentist, so naturally it was completely decided that I would become a dentist when it was time to go to college. My grandfather was a practicing physician. He also made a decision for me that I would follow in his profession. So very early I decided that I would have none of it and knew exactly what I wanted to do, which was be an artist." McComb: "How did you know that? When did you get this interest in art?" Kirkland: "That's an easy question, actually, because I believe any artist who is worth anything at all knows what he wants to do. He doesn't need to be told by somebody that he ought to be an artist. I knew what I wanted to do. I was drawing all of the time. My parents encouraged me to make drawings and I worked with a lot of the materials that children did work with. But I had no training. Finally my family decided that they weren't going to fight me any longer and they did give me the approval to go Cleveland to art school. So that's where I began." Kirkland also said, "Very early in my life, I decided that if something had been done in the field of art, I didn't have to do it again." He tried to make every painting he made better than the last one. Kirkland personally enjoyed creating paintings with sumptuous, saturated color, from the early watercolors to his last paintings--to have his canvases pulsating with color going back to the rich romantic era and also to use gilding from the Renaissance, and to apply that to modern art and to abstractions of ideas as diverse as time, galaxies, nebulae, ancient civilizations, and ruins left by man in Europe, Asia, and America. Kirkland was inspired by many things, including Classical Music. Kirkland was synesthetic, meaning, as he applied it, that he could hear color. While he could sense color when he listened to most music, only certain classical compositions with moderate but not extreme dissonance would provide Kirkland with a desired alloy of colors. Kirkland would listen to compositions when he wasn't painting and write down color combinations that come to him while listening.