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.
Joshs 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 Joshs 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
Joshs 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 Joshs 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, thats what I do, I paint, Josh Kirby.
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