1st Prize Winner
RAYMAR Painting Award

Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2025

Brad Kunkle

Title:

“Behold, The History Without A Past”

Medium & Dimensions:

Oil, gold and silver leaf on linen on wood, 40 x 60 in.

About the Artist

Brad Kunkle has become internationally known for his unique use of gold and silver leaf in contemporary oil painting. His themes explore the shedding of dogmas inherited from previous generations, intuition, and the power of feminine energies as guides for seeking enlightenment in symbiosis with the natural world. His works are in private collections all over the world, the permanent collection of the New Salem Museum, and in a digital time capsule on the Moon as part of the Lunar Codex in partnership with NASA’s Artemis program. Brad is represented by Arcadia Contemporary in New York City and Pontone Gallery in London

“Behold, The History Without A Past”: When I created this painting I was thinking a lot about invisible worlds and the effects of social media on our society and well-being as individuals. I’m realizing there are a lot of parallels between Artificial Intelligence and this concept as well. We interact with versions of people that aren’t entirely real, or in some cases are not at all real, and we’ve romanticized what this future would be like. In the painting, mocking birds were chosen to symbolically represent the mimicking ability of social media personas to be people they are not or represent lives they are not actually living. There is hope and beauty and there are real people and connections to be seen in all of this though…if you look from right perspective.