Brad Kunkle

Acclaimed American painter, Brad Kunkle is a master of figuration, he crafts dramatic scenarios steeped in mystery and symbol. Contemporary iterations of female characters from myth, folklore and legend occupy, and are enfolded by, pastoral and sylvan landscapes where the natural world holds sway.

Kunkle is formidably technically accomplished and performs a virtuoso display of a thorough and painstaking approach to pictorial representation. It is important to note that he makes extensive use of gold and silver leaf. It is the ground on which he paints. This lends a glowing luminescence to the works and makes reference to the sacred pictures of art history.

He deploys delicate and precise draughtsmanship and great attention to detail in his rendering of the form, contour and texture of his subjects. The topographic features and structures of landscape and the particularities of plants, trees and foliage are all analysed and expressed with the same level of rigorous intensity, always with an eye to making an effective composition. His use of colour is rich, subtle and modulated by the radiance of the metal leaf. In certain passages the painter emphasises pattern, flatness and silhouette which indicates the ‘fantastic’, dream-like nature of such scenes. Although compelling in their realism, these images are at the same time expressive of a sense of otherworldliness.

Kunkle speaks of articulating ideas of “feminine energies…in symbiosis with the natural world”. He certainly makes affecting pictures of such an imagined place. His nymphs, dryads, goddesses, and priestesses - all of whom are undoubtedly and emphatically beautiful - are in keeping with an age-old idealisation of the feminine principle. They share their elaborate, romantic and sensuous exoticism with Pre-Raphaelite heroines and Lord Leighton’s cast of ethereal celebrants. Kunkle presents us with his sumptuous, modern-day notion of redemptive female mystery.