Isabella Kirkland

Isabella Kirkland, Forest Floor, oil on polyester over panel, 36" x 60", 2007. Isabella Kirkland (born 1954) is an American visual artist and biodiversity researcher. She is known for intricate, representational paintings that straddle art history, natural science and ecological activism. Since the mid-1990s, she has documented biota in series focused on species that are extinct, disappearing, collected or illegally trafficked, or emerging from near-extinction. Her work fuses the classical naturalist tradition of wildlife painters like John James Audubon and the precise rendering style and time-tested oil techniques of 17th-century Dutch Master still life painters. Situated in the contemporary context of global warming, however, her paintings subtly upend such idealized traditions, invoking a sense of accountability in response to the specter of ecological flux and impermanence. New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote that Kirkland "produces richly atmospheric pictures collectively populated by hundreds of animals. … Updating the peaceable kingdom genre, she is trying to make beautiful paintings of the world at its most beautiful, not for the sake of art but for the sake of our endangered biosphere. She does not preach but communicates an infectious spirit of care." Berkeley Art Museum She has exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences, and has spoken about ecological issues at conferences including several TED events.

Biography Kirkland was born in 1954 in Old Lyme, Connecticut. She attended Guildford College in North Carolina and Virginia Commonwealth University, before studying sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1970s. New York Times critic Vivien Raynor wrote of the Real Art Ways exhibition, which addressed overpopulation, nuclear war and racism: "Seemingly reluctant to bully her viewers, Kirkland errs on the side of tortuousness and sometimes, of playfulness, but her integrity is unmistakable."

In 2004, Kirkland suffered neural and motor control damage from parasitic infection after a tropical roundworm attacked part of her spinal cord. The incident and its effects—so rare that doctors were unaware of the symptoms or treatments—left her unable to draw for several months. She eventually recovered full control of her right hand, but was left with chronic neuropathic pain in the upper right quadrant of her body, most critically, dysesthesia (sometimes described as a burning sensation under the skin) in her hand and wrist; she has stated that the condition can abate during the flow-state induced by painting. the National Academy of Sciences, Tucson Museum of Art and Whatcom Museum.

Kirkland lives in Sausalito, California with her husband, Chris Tellis, on a yellow ferryboat docked in the San Francisco Bay.

Naturalistic painting Isabella Kirkland, Gone, oil on polyester over panel, 48" x 36", 2004. In the 1990s, Kirkland's early artistic focus on impermanence shifted to a consideration of art's lasting power;

Kirkland's naturalist paintings are characteristically large, lush works composed like well-balanced tapestries that both celebrate decorative beauty and address environmental degradation and homogenization. Her show "Nudibranchia: Butterflies of the Sea" (Bolinas Museum, 2014) explored those wildly colorful, soft-bodied marine gastropod mollusks in works that included a large canvas arraying 206 of the creatures life-size in rows from smallest (at top) to largest. including TEDx DeExtinction (2013), The Long Now Foundation (2016) she is an artist partner of Art To Acres, an organization supporting large-scale global land and animal conservation through art and financial donations. Berkeley Art Museum, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Hammer Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Queens Museum, RISD Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, and Zimmerli Art Museum, among others.

Her paintings have been reproduced as illustrations for several books and publications and as cover art for Whole Earth magazine and the books The Future of Life (2002) by E. O. Wilson, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017, by Rose, van Dooren and Chrulew), and Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade (2020) by Rosemary-Claire Collard.

Kirkland has been recognized with a Wynn Newhouse Award (2008) and grants from George Sugarman Foundation (2005) and Marin Arts Council (2004).