He was a painter of vivid, luminescent wildlife paintings and energetic plein air works, but James Kirkland will probably be best remembered for three major mural projects he executed in Salt Lake City. The Utah artist died July 20, 2026, at the age of 66. His niece, Amy Talbot, said he had health problems in recent years, including a stroke.

A Salt Lake City native, Kirkland turned down art scholarships out of high school to study math and science at Cal Poly and the University of Utah, then started his professional life as an illustrator in New York City, training under illustrator Kim Whitesides, a fellow Utahn. He began in airbrush before later moving into Photoshop. He spent twelve years in New York as a commercial illustrator, creating the American flag livery for Union Pacific locomotives and producing work for Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Audi, Delta, United, GM, AT&T, and ExxonMobil, along with a MAD Magazine cover and regular editorial illustration for GQ, New York, and Esquire. He was included in the Smithsonian’s “Walk Across America” (1998) and a Mad Magazine retrospective (1998).

Utah artist Carel Brest van Kempen met Kirkland in the 1980s, before he left for New York. “I liked him right away because of his unique view of the world and his sense of humor (also unique),” van Kempen said. “In those days, his artwork was quite good, but by the time he’d returned from his twelve-year stint in the crucible of the Manhattan advertising scene, it had advanced to something quite sublime.”

Kirkland returned to Utah in the late ’90s to help take care of his mother, and stayed. He didn’t mind New York City, Talbot said, but missed his family and the West. “He had a special bond with the natural world and wanted to be more in it,” she said.

“Tanka Golden Heart” by James Kirkland.

(Plein air pieces by James Kirkland, courtesy Amy Talbot)

In Utah, he continued to take on illustration work, but increasingly focused on his fine art. He had an exacting studio practice that included grinding and mixing his own pigments in the manner of the old masters. In his more elaborate paintings he would use these build up dozens of layers of thin, transparent oil. His fine art ranged from historical realism to Western subject matter, especially wildlife paintings (inspired by summers spent at a family cabin in Jackson, Wyoming). He was also a serious student of the brushwork of past masters, becoming something of an amateur scholar in the field and doing occasional authentication work; that knowledge shaped pieces like “Tanka Golden Heart,” which sets a bison against a backdrop built from details of paintings by Leonardo, Dalí, and Monet, with the brushwork on each section of the animal mimicking the corresponding artist. In 2019, he spent two years painting a series of nine Victorian-style portraits of the Meredith family, commissioned for the Magnolia Network’s home-renovation series “Home Work”—an episode that went on to win a Daytime Emmy. He exhibited with Trailside Gallery in Jackson Hole and Coda Gallery in Park City, and was most recently represented by Faust Gallery.

Kirkland was also an avid plein air painter. “He loved nothing more than spending an entire day painting landscapes on site, and was particularly enamored with sagebrush steppe country,” van Kempen said. He spent his winters in the studio he had at the Positively Fourth Street building in Salt Lake City, but spent his summers in a camper in the hills east of the city. “He liked to get away from civilization,” Talbot said. Plein air work was, in her words, “his way of detoxing and letting go from those detailed paintings.”

In 2008, long before street murals began to dot Utah’s urban landscape, Kirkland began work on the outside wall of Wasatch Touring in Salt Lake City (700 East and 100 South). The original mural stitched together seven separate landscapes and outdoor activities across one long wall. He later repainted the mural. Around the same time, he painted a mural on the side of Milo Sports on 3300 South, which has since been covered over.

Kirkland’s current mural on Wasatch Touring, 700 East 100 South, Salt Lake City.

Positively 4th Street Mural. The Blocks SLC recently posted an interview with Kirkland about this mural.

In 2015, on the back of the Positively Fourth Street music practice space near Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Park, he painted a large-scale illusion piece known as “Calling Our Ancestors”—four children and a mascot cat descending or peeking around a set of stone steps, meant to represent the people who came before, set against the backdrop of a building standing since 1904. A painted gilded frame within the mural opens onto an interior scene, a painting-within-the-painting titled “Beyond Eden.” Kirkland created the piece with co-creator Marinette Wagner.

A third major mural sits at the Kimball Building along the S-Line’s 300 East station. Painted in 2018, it’s an 18-by-330-foot wall that starts as minimal bands of color and gradually resolves into a swirling stand of aspens—an abstraction that stands apart from the illusionistic and representational work he was otherwise known for. It was a massive and intimidating undertaking. His longtime partner Trudy Day says he was afraid of the scaffolding (this was before scissor lifts became standard practice) and constantly worried about falling. He received help from Larry Dustin, Ben Higbee and van Kempen. Van Kempen remembers he and Kirkland working the scaffolding seven days a week through the hottest two months of that summer.

Kirkland in his Positively 4th Street Studio. Courtesy Amy Talbot.

“Two out-of-shape, sixty-year-old men lugging heavy tubs of paint up and down scaffolding all day in 100-degree heat,” is how van Kempen describes it. “As we worked, I enjoyed listening to James’ tales of unscrupulous clients and alien abductions. Towards the end of that project, with only about 15 feet of wall left to paint, we sat on the scaffolding, hot and exhausted, sweeping our brushes in a motion that had become practically involuntary, and James turned to me, saying, ‘If somebody came up to me right now and asked me to paint another mural this size, offering to pay me $100,000, I’d just start to cry.'”

Yet he continued to chase light: in the west desert he loved to paint, in the luminous layers of his studio work, and across the walls of the city he called home. His paintings and murals continue to reflect the qualities friends remember most: an exacting eye, a wry sense of humor, and an enduring love of the landscapes and wildlife of the American West.

Kirkland is survived by his brothers Stephen, Michael, and David Kirkland; his sister Suzanne Kirkland; and eight nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his sister, Kimberly Kirkland. No plans for a memorial have been announced.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.