Eve Kirk's paintings were shown alongside those of Paul Nash at Arthur Tooth's gallery in 1939. Like Nash, she had studied at the Slade, and she was primarily a landscape painter. Tate's oil painting Avignon (1939) shows evidence of her training in the skilled, detailed delineation of the city across a sweep of fields and river. Kirk's work was included in the centenary exhibition The Slade Tradition, held at the Fine Art Society in 1971, with a number of other women artists who had been Slade students, including Carrington, Margaret Fisher Prout and Edna Clarke Hall.
Augustus John lent two paintings by Kirk that he owned to her solo exhibition held at the W.B. Paterson Gallery, London in 1930. Both were of the south of France. He also supplied the catalogue preface, writing: 'With a curious swiftness and certainty she has captured a method, a technique which seems to provide a perfect means for the interpretation of the subjects of her choice, the streets, the quays and the market-places of Provence, Italy or London.' The London scenes included two paintings of an area strongly associated with modern British art, Fitzroy Street and Fitzroy Square. Two years later, an exhibition at Arthur Tooth's included her painting The Thames at Wapping, owned by the Contemporary Art Society.
Kirk worked as part of the civil defense from the outbreak of the war, and her exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1943 was, for the most part, made up of paintings of London, including From Waterloo Bridge, Old Compton Street and Charlotte Street- Her Bomb Damage in the City was shown as part of the exhibition National War Pictures at the Royal Academy in 1945. Kirk also worked as a designer, creating posters for Shell during the 1930s. She also decorated the Catholic Church in Newtown, Montgomery in the mid 1940s. When she moved to Italy, a decade later, Kirk stopped painting. |
