Josh Kirby biography

Ronald William "Josh" Kirby (27 November 1928 – 23 October 2001; Liverpool, UK)

Josh Kirby was an English commercial artist born in Waterloo, on the outskirts of Liverpool, Merseyside.

Josh Kirby was educated at the Liverpool City School of Art, where he acquired the nickname Josh, which comes from having his work compared to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The nickname stuck and Kirby was rarely called by his real name later. He died unexpectedly, of natural causes, in his sleep at home in Shelfanger near Diss in Norfolk at the age of 72. He was painting a new addition to his Magnum Opus, the Voyage of the Ayeguy portfolio before he died.

He worked as freelance all his career, having left his only employment after half a day.

After leaving art school, Liverpool City Council commissioned him to paint the Lord Mayor, Alderman Joseph Jackson Cleary, in 1950. Kirby carried out the commission but decided against portraiture as a career and turned to illustration for film posters and books.

Kirby painted film-posters, magazine and book covers. Creating a total of over 400 cover paintings, his personal preference was for science fiction jackets (for example see Robert Silverberg's Majipoor novels and Kirby's own Voyage of the Ayeguy) and his work on the covers of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of novels is well known. He also created the poster art for Monty Python's Life of Brian and Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

When the market for film poster illustration dried up in the mid 1980s, Kirby switched his attention to role-playing games. He provided cover art for Duelmasters, Tunnels & Trolls and Wizards & Warriors.

Kirby's major output between the late 1950s to the 1980s was artwork for book covers for a very wide range of books including westerns, crime novels, science fiction and non-fiction, as well as covers and interior art for science fiction magazines. His first published book cover art was for the 1955 science fiction novel Cee-Tee Man, by Dan Morgan. In 1956, he created a cover for Ian Fleming's book Moonraker.[3] Working for publishers including Panther, Corgi, Four Square and NEL/Mayflower,[6] he illustrated over 400 covers for authors including Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Stephen Briggs, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Craig Shaw Gardner, Ron Goulart, Robert Heinlein, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Kerouac, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Matheson, Guy de Maupassant, Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Jimmy Sangster, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells.

Charles de Lint said Kirby stood apart from most genre commercial artists for "his own flair and unique vision". He worked almost exclusively in oils.

In 1991, Paper Tiger Books published a graphic album collecting some commercial and private works by Kirby, titled In the Garden of Unearthly Delights (a reference to Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights). This was followed in 1999 by another graphic album titled A Cosmic Cornucopia, which includes extensive text by David Langford and two chapters dedicated to his work for Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.
Source: Wikipedia; Illustration Art Gallery

See JOSH KIRBY ART.