JOSH KIRBY R.I.P

Josh died on Tuesday 23rd October in bed at his home in Norfolk. Although he has had heart problems over the last couple of years he was very chirpy and full of life the last time I spoke to him only a week before his death and was telling me about his work on a new 'Voyage of the Ayeguy' painting.  His death is a very sad sudden shock to all of us and especially for his partner Jackie who has been his close companion for many years. Even those who barely knew Josh would all say the same thing, he was a very kind, charming, friendly man who was totally dedicated to his vocation and a Master Craftsman in the old traditional sense. He was the perfect gentleman and one of the most professional people I have ever had the pleasure to deal with.  He was that rare character whose word was always inviolable.  If he told you he would do something you could trust that as much as the sun coming up the next day.  With regards to his work, his fame and the accolades he has received throughout his career speak for themselves. People often forget that he was a well-established professional artist long before the Discworld series with which he became inseparably related.  Josh defined how the Discworld looked right from the start.  As Terry Pratchett once said, there are very few cover artists who have quite so strongly associated themselves with the books they front.   Josh’s professional and painstaking approach to his work is evident from the way he thoroughly read each book, made endless notes and sketches and then worked meticulously to produce the finished painting.  He demonstrated a brilliant use of perspective (see ‘Small Gods’ for instance where we are appropriately on our knees as the viewer!) and always had a determination to do something unusual.  He would experiment with different techniques and include lots of little details that sometimes go unnoticed.  But Josh was not just a “working artist”; he was a painter in the old traditional sense.  He loved painting.  It was his life.  Business concerns, whilst necessary, were not of much real interest to him, quite simple because they stopped him from painting.  His great love was his own project ‘Voyage of the Ayeguy’ which was a series of paintings depicting the story of a kind of sci-fi evangelism and its consequences.  As well as all the reproductions of his paintings there are two books all about Josh’s work – ‘Garden of Unearthly Delights’ and ‘Cosmic Cornucopia’ which cover much of his career right from his early days through to the later Discworld paintings.   These at least live on as a testament to his brilliant creativity.

It was Josh’s wish, in his typically generous and openhearted way, that his paintings should be available to be seen by anyone without charge.   He could have made a lot of money by selling his originals but this was not his motivation.  He was a true artist in every sense of the word and it is our fervent hope that a permanent exhibition of Josh’s paintings will be made available in the near future to celebrate the work of this great man whom we will all miss very much and whose death is a very sad loss for this world as much as it is for the Discworld.

“I am a painter, that’s what I do, I paint,” – Josh Kirby.

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