Upon completing his 5-year, self-imposed apprenticeship to drawing, Firkins taught himself to paint in oils in the early '90s. Originally oil paint for him was a studio medium, where he painted from still lifes, models, and his imagination. He also used oils to create remembrances of lives past and emotional themes growing from his present life, as in the show "Heart Break," where the images are expressions of doom and impending loss connected to his lover’s cancer.

From the studio Firkins moved into the open air and became an avid outdoor painter, eventually giving up the brush for the knife, which worked better to spread viscous oil paint in subzero winter temperatures.

The show "The Space Between" was done over the year 1996 on location. The paintings, of spaces we pass every day without really seeing, had a spiritual, almost Taoist feel to them.

While the bulk of his outdoor work in oils is representational in content, it is entirely abstract in its perception and creation. Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself is the essence Firkins claims all true artists seek. But the thing itself is made visible by conversing with it through abstractions. These abstractions are merely marks with paint, meaningful only as they create a context of meaning, as notes or notations of form, space, light, shade, and color. The magic of painting, for instance, is the transformation of chromium and cadmium into sunlight dappling a tree.