Review

An Architect Finds Creative Renewal in Art

Line is a key quality in any work of art. Drawn or implied sight directors play off of each other, create space, and define forms to present balance and add movement to a composition. Pure lines, sections of theoretical points aiming infinitely in a single direction, can stand virtually alone in representing a building. Architecture can be reduced to black-and white items — a drawing of an elevation or floor plan. Sketching by hand is still an important component of the creative process for many architects, whose profession has largely replaced its Mayline straightedges, mylar, and rapidograph drafting pens with AutoCAD and other rendering software. There are advocates for the slowness of hand drafting as a method, and in a commercial environment, where the business of architecture is played out, maintaining inspiration and creativity is not usually automatic. For one local architect, painting and sculpting outside of the workplace have kept his inventiveness and ingenuity sharp.

Brian Firkins is a project manager for HOK Sport Venue Event in Kansas City, Missouri, one of 26 regional offices of the international multidisciplinary firm. He is currently engaged with the Kauffman Stadium renovation for the Kansas City Royals, and his mixed-media representations of the H. Roe Bartle Hall Convention Center were shown in July and August, 2008, in the spacious and bright entry lobby of the H&R Block World
Headquarters in Kansas City, amid other more permanent artwork.

The dominant lines in his work, set at 45- and 90-degree angles in Bartle Hall No. 8a or Bartle Hall No. 16c, for example, resonated with the lines of the two-story indoor waterfall wall and with other straight edges inside the elliptical 2006 building. Solidly set across square Masonite panels of various sizes, the lines echo the most visible element of the convention center, its façade. Firkins’ paintings express the part in between the load-bearing structural elements of the building, the wind bracing for the metal panels of covering, not the pylons and cable stays.

“I’m not sure everyone really connects with the strong reliance upon the actual structural geometry of Bartle Hall,” he says. “I’ve sometimes toyed with the idea of mounting a photograph of the building as an aid when I exhibit, but I’ve chosen to let the viewers make their own connection.”

Strong color and unexpected texture meet to present a number of different moods for the Bartle pieces, much as a building appears to change in different light due to weather and time of day. The reliable triangles, placed with thoughtful balance to create clips of the original building that inspired the work, allow for slightly less regular elements to be layered on for an engaging effect. Bartle Hall No. 11 and Bartle Hall No. 15a rely on bold red triangles framed above and below by thick horizontals of black or, in No. 11, a literal sky-colored blue.

The sharp geometric pattern is broken up along the triangles’ lines with added primaries like yellow in No. 11 and by stripped in shredded paper in No. 15a and No. 7a. In pieces like No. 16c and No. 8a, earthier tones become dominant, reds disappear, and painted burlap rectangles are attached with safety pins apparent upon close inspection to create a grid of what might be windows; the yellow ochre found in No. 15a is played out in full in No. 16c, and the burlap pieces have a softness like light playing off glass. Bartle Hall No. 8a presents a dark ground, with the triangles worked up in a light brown that also offsets the distressed edges of black-painted burlap strips.

Firkins’ artist statement explains that he aims to achieve “an interaction of exciting harmony or dissonance.” For him, structure lives at the core of everything and gives visual art a framework, like music requires meter for its melody. As an artist, Firkins writes, he is able to interpret his architectural knowledge in a way that allows liberties unavailable in the architectural vocabulary.

There are about 24 in the Bartle Hall series, says Firkins, who worked on them over 2006 and 2007; it is evident they are not his first foray into fine art. Firkins grew up in a family in which his grandfather, father, and two uncles all built their own homes, so he was exposed to construction at an early age, and his mother’s skills earned her a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute, so there was always art around their Independence, Missouri, home. Firkins painted during and following high school, and at Kansas University, where he received his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1965, the coursework included painting and sculpture. Upon graduation, he sculpted Modular Expressions; professionally, he started to lean toward the management side of architecture and project design, working at smaller firms until landing at another international multidisciplinary firm, HNTB, in 1979.

A project manager’s responsibility is to lead the design, construction drawing, and the construction administration of projects. With HNTB, Firkins was involved in downtown Kansas City projects such as the AT&T Town Pavilion (1986), the 1201 Walnut building (1991), and the renovation of Union Station for Science City (1999). The impressions made on him during working on the 1994 Bartle Hall improvements would incubate for a decade before reappearing as fine art.

At about the same time he started with HOK in 2001, Firkins says, he decided to pick up art more seriously. To move his work out of hibernation, he enrolled in a continuing education class at KCAI to study collage and painting with Doug Russell. He returned to study sculpture and welding under Martin Cail. He has continued to fuel his craft by taking a watercolor class from Craig Lueck.

The first idea he pursued when he got back to taking painting seriously took the form of magic-marker representations of the Bartle design he had managed. “It didn’t gel,” he says, and he plunged into a different mixed-media series called Glances. These collages incorporate faces looking straight ahead, atop abstracted upper bodies, which are oval-shaped pods, as if everyone were wearing a robe or shroud. Firkins takes the theme of the fleeting eye-contact moment and pushes it through different expressions and contorted composites. The panels are divided into general blocks, with the intersection of four planes happening at the center of the face, fixing the viewer’s eyes for long periods of time. Color-schemes found in the Bartle series were chosen as early as 2005, when the Glances series was painted. Firkins’ subjects in Glances range from the unknown stranger to identifiable figures like Jesus and Presidents George W. Bush and Harry S. Truman. He has started a follow-up series to Glances and is a member of the Kansas City Artists Coalition.

In keeping with the predominant architectural spirit of the day and with his personal direction, Firkins is moving toward using recycled materials. The strips of paper and burlap in the Bartle series were already trash, and for his more recent Pilons series, the spindle-shaped sculptures are made out of plotting paper tubes and covered with remnants of other paintings.

Like many architects in our community who are also artists or use art as an outlet, Firkins paints because he has to paint. “It’s not really a choice,” he says. “It’s like breathing. When I stop breathing, I’ll stop painting.”

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