By 1925 he had his own advertising art studio, and his specialty was illustrating industrial machinery, precise work for people who needed to see exactly what a thing looked like.
In 1933 he came across the Indian rock paintings at Paint Rock, out on the Concho.
He had not discovered them. Ranch families and travelers had known that bluff for a long while. What he saw was that the paintings were being vandalized, and he worked out that if a trained artist made accurate copies while they were still legible, something would survive no matter what happened to the rock itself.
So that is how the he spent every vacation from 1934 through 1941. He and his wife drove out to the Lower Pecos country, and to Hueco Tanks, and into the shelters above the canyons, and he lay on his back on the stone floor to work, using a scaling method he had devised himself so the copies would be true in size and proportion.
Kirkland was a founder and president of the Dallas Archeological Society a director of the West Texas Historical and Scientific Society, a regional vice president of the Texas Archeological and Paleontological Society (later the Texas Archeological Society), and a fellow of the Texas Academy of Science
He was working on making a book, and had it mocked up when he died,
the University of Texas Press published The Rock Art of Texas Indians, featuring Kirkland’s paintings and a text by W.W. Newcomb, who also developed his own numbering system for the 1967 publication (reissued in 1996) in which the plates are geographically ordered.
When Amistad International Reservoir was completed in 1969, many Lower Pecos rock art sites disappeared beneath the waves. Other rock art sites have been damaged by vandals or by natural disasters such as major floods. And all surviving rock art, particularly pictographs, are subject to continued natural weathering.
Another book is by A. T. Jackson & his broad coverage of Texas rock art
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