"Vance Kirkland (Ohio, 1904 - Denver, 1981) was a fine, mysterious American painter whose unique abstract methods were not discovered and appreciated until after he died. During the first half of his fifty-four year career, he was nationally famous in America for his masterful realist and surrealist watercolor, gouache and casein paintings and he exhibited with such artists as Dali, Ernst, Margritte and Miro. The abrupt transition to abstraction and oil sent him into a spiral of oblivion but also into increasingly brilliant and distinctive paintings. He had started mixing watercolor and denatured alcohol, and later oil paint and water for a major period of resist abstract expressionism." "Kirkland's paintings have been awakened from their isolation in the middle of America to take a rightful place in global art."--BOOK JACKET.