KIRBY'S BIO

After studying art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Kirby Lucero went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in Philadelphia. While practicing law he continued to cultivate his interest in art and began to paint in the evenings. He started painting because he had just moved into an apartment in Los Angeles with high ceilings and great wall-space. At the time he could not afford original art so he started doing it himself. It began as an escape, a rebellion from a conventional life and a need to live with art.

When he creates he returns to the visceral, the primordial, the primitive essence of being. The creative act is at times trance-like. The paintings are a window into another realm, perhaps the subconscious. He throws himself into his work, always figuratively, sometimes literally.

The works are provocative, engaging and interesting. Some of the paintings are wildly cathartic, bold, energetic, controversial and violent in their expressiveness. They tend to capture and memorialize what would otherwise be a transient flash of beauty.

The minimalist paintings are calming and elegant in their austerity. Their mantra is beauty in simplicity; the quest for a simple, pure life – inner peace is not found in layers of ornamentation or in the collection of the material.