Commenting on Kirkland's works from 1954 to 1981, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Lóránd Hegyi, stated, “... in his later work, he developed a visionary art which mystically empathized with the entire universe, gave cosmic universality visual form in explosive images and used panel painting to convey the perpetually changing state of the universe.”[1] After his death Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art was founded in his name.

In addition to painting and teaching (detailed in the “Educator” section below), Kirkland volunteered his time for many institutions.

She noted: “...each of these periods, of course, has been tied together with a primary interest of communicating the human spirit’s adventure through time.

He invented surrealist worlds of deadwood morphing into whimsical creatures, which dwarf pre-historic humans, scampering among the vegetation.

Charles Stuckey, Curator of 20th Century Painting and Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago, commented, “...they show a virtuosity in his control of shape and transparency with the watercolor medium, that enables him to do in watercolor what artists like [René] Magritte and [Salvador] Dalí would be doing in oil at the same time...”[9] Elizabeth Broun, former Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, further discussed this period: “I find in his surrealist works a charming willingness to contemplate nature as a positive force and evolution as a series of potentials.

It’s a release of energy as a magnificent act of creation.”[10] “Some of his landscapes have proto-creatures, little animal forms and shapes, biomorphic, evolutionary beings.

Charles Stuckey analyzed part of this period: “There is a sense of labyrinth about his line, for example, that is obvious in these timberline abstract paintings—which are ostensibly developed from his meditations on leaves that he would see on the forest floor....some of the early attempts by him to achieve texture look like that wood grain that would obsess him and appear in everything, that one would associate with a table top, then with a sort of still life arranged on it, but a still life that went away and only left these incredible tracings.”[12] 4.

[14] Elizabeth Broun commented, “For my own feelings, the ideas about space, about time, about nebula, about becoming, about creation were fabulously expressed in the ‘50s and early ‘60s...I suspect that the nebula will emerge as an important aspect of his career.”[15] Charles Stuckey discussed Kirkland's Roman and Asian Abstractions from this fourth period, “Kirkland traveled widely around the world in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and brought to the grimy and colorless, dirty, abstract expressionist school a whole variety of color experiences that went way beyond the streets of Manhattan: from the deep red colors of Pompeii and Herculaneum—the wall paintings that he saw there—to the lacquer surfaces of art that he saw in the Far East.”[16] 5.

[17] Péter Fitz, director of the Kiscelli Múzeum, Budapest, stated, “A highly unique period ensued, the long series of ‘Dot Paintings’. ...

he achieved a kind of intensity that otherwise one associates in the history of art with, not only the Orphism and Futurism of the early 20th century, but the madness of Van Gogh. ...

It’s a painting which is immense in its scale, which has a kind of chromatic intensity almost unmatched in 20th century art, which is full of energy—of a chromatic energy and of energy of design ...”[21] Kirkland derived many of his color combinations for his paintings through his synesthetic ability to sense color in music, especially classical compositions.

Mahler, Schoenberg, Bartok, Berg, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Ives all explored new tonalities that aided me in transposing sounds into colors.” [22] Although he could derive colors from the music of most composers, he wanted a certain amount of musical dissonance which would give him the desired vibrating color combinations for his paintings, hence his interest primarily in modern composers.

Kirkland would listen to musical compositions at home, writing notes on scraps of paper when he heard passages that produced ideas for color schemes in his paintings.

On Sunday, November 6, 2016, in partnership with Mammoth Moving & Rigging Inc. and Shaw Construction, the three-room Vance Kirkland studio building was moved through the neighborhood via eight sets of remote-controlled articulating wheels to its new home eight blocks west at 12th & Bannock, where it is part of the new Kirkland Museum.