Newport artist Roger Kirby with Mission No. 9 Sterkrade, inspired by his father’s experiences as an Royal Air Force pilot.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

NEWPORT Painter Roger Kirby happily admits that he leads a charmed life. For three months each year, he lives and works at his summer house on the coast of Maine. He spends another six months in Newport, where his studio overlooks a quiet street off Bellevue Avenue. And the final three months?

“That’s for sailing,” he says. “I’m afraid I’m really a bit of a fanatic about it.”

It’s an idyllic existence — or at least it was until three years ago, when Kirby made what he calls a “life-altering discovery.” While attending his father’s funeral, Kirby found a logbook detailing more than two dozen bombing missions that his father, a former British RAF pilot, had flown during World War II. The discovery was especially surprising, Kirby says, because his father rarely talked about his wartime experiences.

“Socially, he was a very outgoing, very gregarious fellow,” Kirby recalls. “But when it came to the war, he was very tight-lipped. If it came up in conversation, he always changed the subject.”

Convinced that destiny had led him to the logbook — “It was as if my father had finally decided to reveal some of his best-kept secrets,” he says — Kirby embarked on a two-year quest to visit and document each of the 30 sites (mainly in northern France and Germany) listed on the book’s pages. The result, a suite of paintings that Kirby calls “30 Missions,” is currently on display at the Newport Art Museum.

During a recent tour of the exhibit, Kirby described the paintings, which range from bosky landscapes to gritty urban scenes to nearly abstract views of World War II-era bunkers and pillboxes, as his way of coming to terms with his father’s memory. The works are not intended as an illustrated history lesson, he said. Rather, they are meant to evoke both the past and the present.

“I really didn’t want to do the whole Saving Private Ryan thing, with bombs dropping and bullets whizzing past,” he said. “That’s been done before. Rather my goal was to visit these places — some of which I found out weren’t even on the map anymore — and try to absorb the nature of each place. What had they looked like before the war? How would they have looked to my father, who after all never got very close to any of the places he bombed? What did they look like now? Those were the kinds of questions I wanted to ask.”

Kirby, who’s lived in the United States since 1993 but who still speaks with a pub-worthy British accent, said the exhibit was also a way of expressing thoughts and feelings that his father kept largely to himself.

“I really see it as a kind of pilgrimage — a voyage of discovery,” he said. “Growing up, I was very close to my dad. But like a lot of parents, some things were simply left unsaid. Yet oftentimes when I was visiting a specific place mentioned in the logbook, I felt as though he was finally speaking to me.”

Kirby said the series also posed an artistic challenge.

A graduate of London’s Kingston University and the Cardiff School of Art in Wales, Kirby is known mainly as a painter of portraits and landscapes. But following the list of bombing sites listed in his father’s logbook meant visiting a wide variety of locations — cities, towns, farms, even an old German rocket plant.

“That was probably my biggest fear starting out,” Kirby said. “That I wouldn’t be up to the task I was setting for myself. That I wouldn’t be able to convey the full measure of the experience.”

Fortunately, those fears proved to be unfounded. Though there are obvious differences among the paintings — some, for example, are almost completely abstract while others have the you-are-there immediacy of painted photographs — each one conveys a powerful sense of place. At the same time, Kirby’s decision to mix images of past and present, war and peace gives the series added resonance.

Chronologically, the show begins with Calais, a painting of the northern French seaport that became a major allied landing site. In the painting, we gaze across the city’s harbor toward the British Channel. In the distance, you can just make out a hazy line of chalk-white hills — the famed white cliffs of Dover.

Kirby said he deliberately avoided the more modern sections of Calais, a bustling port city that was extensively rebuilt after the war. Instead, he focused on places — the city’s horseshoe-shaped harbor, the British Channel, the white cliffs — that look the same today as they did during the war.

“That’s one of the great things about a place like Calais,” he said. “You can stand on the edge of the harbor and look across the Channel, and it’s exactly what you would have seen 30, 40, 50 years ago. The war may be over, but the memories of what happened there are still very fresh.”

Another painting, Foret de Croc, depicts the site of a World War II-era German emplacement. When Kirby finally found the spot indicated in his father’s logbook, it turned out to be densely overgrown with trees. (The word “foret” is French for forest.) Kirby decided to paint it anyway.

“Actually, I thought it was a perfect metaphor for the way life goes on,” Kirby said. “Fifty years ago, this was a place people were willing to fight and die over. Today, you could drive right past it and never know it was there.”

Not all of Kirby’s paintings depict geographical locations. Caen, for example, is a city in northwestern France. But the painting by that name in “30 Missions” actually features a portrait of Jean Daligault, a French priest and resistance leader who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Kirby said he learned of Daligault’s fate while visiting a memorial to the slain priest erected in Caen after the war.

“Frankly, I’d never heard of him,” Kirby said. “But after doing a bit of research, I found out that he really was quite an extraordinary man. I thought he deserved to be better known.”

One of the show’s most striking paintings is St. Omer II, a view of a vast cathedral-like hall filled with glinting shafts of light. But looks can be deceiving. As it turns out, St. Omer was a major assembly plant for Germany’s V2 rockets, which terrorized much of England during World War II.

“Of all the places I visited, St. Omer was one of the most amazing — and the most terrifying,” Kirby said. “The main assembly building is an engineering marvel. But you’re also keenly aware that this was a place devoted to only one thing: death. Just walking around the place can give you chills.”

Though only a handful of paintings depict actual battle scenes, Kirby said he couldn’t ignore the violence and devastation of war altogether. A painting called Gelsenkirchen, for example, features a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with human bones and skulls.

In the foreground, some of the bones have been inscribed with numbers, many of them reaching into the tens of thousands. Kirby says they are based on estimates of the number of German civilians killed and wounded during World War II.

“No matter how much you dress it up in patriotic colors, war is a dirty, deadly business,” Kirby said. “It was that way a half-century ago when my dad and his crewmates were flying their bombing missions. And it’s that way now. Just look at the casualty figures coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan. War is hell.”

“30 Missions” continues through April 6 at the Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Ave. Hours: Mon.-Sat. 10-4 and Sun. noon-4. Admission: $6 adults, $5 seniors, $4 military personnel and students with I.D., free 5 and under. Contact: (401) 848-8200 or online at www.newportartmuseum.org.

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