In October 2024, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art merged with the Denver Art Museum, adding the yellow building at 12th and Bannock and rich collections of Colorado art and international decorative art to the DAM’s world-class collection. Vance Kirkland, namesake of the Kirkland, created numerous series of paintings inspired by his love of the cosmos.
Vance Kirkland painting in his studio, 1979. Photo by Hugh Grant.
Creation of Space, 1960, oil paint and water on linen, 74 x 105 inches.
Scarlet Vibrations on Green Mysteries in Blue Space, 1972, oil paint and water on linen, 50 x 50 inches. Vance Kirkland dedicated this painting to Majel Barrett Roddenberry.
I am trying to paint something I do not know exists in a tangible way. If I am looking at space, who is to say it never existed; it has existed in my mind.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched their Sputnik satellite, sparking a world-wide fascination with space. Vance Kirkland (1904–1981), painting in Colorado, was ahead of the curve. By 1954, he was painting nebulae, the birthplaces of stars. He committed most of his late career to depictions of his fictitious version of space.
Kirkland moved to Denver in 1929 to serve as the founding director of the University of Denver’s new art school. He painted realistic landscapes in watercolor at the time, but never wanted to get comfortable in his art, leading him away from watercolor and into explorations with oil paint. He even developed a unique resist technique, mixing oil paint with water to create surfaces reminiscent of a cratered moon.
Kirkland’s early interest in outer space was fueled by scientific publications. He subscribed to Astronomy magazine. He also followed the work of physicist Albert Einstein, astronomer Fred Hoyle, and scientist Carl Sagan, dedicating paintings to each of them.
While early photographic images of space existed in Kirkland’s lifetime, the Hubble and Webb telescopes were both launched after Kirkland died in 1981. Any similarities of his paintings to photographs of space are coincidence. In fact, Kirkland was appalled when he saw early images of space. “When Time Magazine came out to publish a lot of photographs that they had been able to make, and a few in color, about nebula in space: I merely said, ‘My God, I’ve become realistic.’ I felt immediately it was a dead end, and I had no interest then in doing these images about space. I felt that it had been done now with a photograph, there’s no need for me to think about it anymore and I stopped. That’s why a trip around the world put me into a different kind of thinking. And yet the images of space always were in the back of my mind.”
Kirkland took time to travel and find inspiration in the colors he saw in Italy and Southeast Asia. He used his oil paint and water technique to depict stucco surfaces and abstract compositions inspired by the places he visited. But he couldn’t let go of space entirely.
Kirkland embraced space references in popular culture. Star Trek premiered on NBC on September 8, 1966. Kirkland dedicated a dot painting to actress Majel Berrett Roddenberry, known for playing several roles and voicing the computer interfaces on the series. She was also married to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Kirkland talked about the popular television program in 1977:
“I watched Star Trek probably twenty or thirty times, and I know every program that they have done. I almost know the lines. …There are some of them I am very fascinated with, and I think the only reason is that this is pure imagination—pure fantasy—and it is getting away from the hum-drum days of living.
“…If you look at Star Trek long enough, you will find there are all these little dots. They break the human being down into little tiny dots; he’s beamed to the next planet, or beamed into another part of the universe. And it is all done with little tiny white dots, little tiny dots. He’s disintegrated into dots of matter, and beamed and then reassembled again.”
Kirkland did not get the idea of painting dots from Star Trek but enjoyed finding the similarities to his ideas in the program. His imagination led him to create numerous series depicting the evolution and expansion of his own universe, culminating in his vibrant Dot Paintings.
