Brandon Kralik was born in Virginia in 1966. He spent his early years travelling extensively across North America and has lived in 10 of the 50 United States.
He has been drawing and painting all of his life, developing an early interest in comics and animation.
He majored in Art at Western State College of Colorado and advanced his studies in New York City where he was employed at an animation studio as well as a teacher of comic book art.
It was in New York City, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
that he was first exposed to, came face to face with, the great masterworks of the world.
As a high school student he has come across a book of Carravagio paintings. He showed it to his art teacher saying that "This is how I want to learn to paint" but his teacher said to him that all of the secrets had been lost, that nobody could paint like that anymore.
Once he actually saw the masterworks of the past he began to question....to wonder....
why not?
From the busy chaotic rhythms of New York City he went to work in the Salmon fishing industry on
Bristol Bay in Alaska during the summers, spending his winters skiing in the mountains of Colorado. He eventually purchased a sailboat in Juneau, Alaska which he lived on for three years while he worked a number of jobs that included a book store, manager of a vegetarian deli, and as operator of his own house painting business. During these years he kept filling sketchbooks with studies, he took every opportunity to draw and study with life drawing groups as well as maintaining painting studios. He bagan exhibiting his work at local coffee houses and in group shows at Potfolio Gallery in Juneau.
From there he moved to Hawaii, to the island of Maui where he began to
seriously develope his skills as a painter.
In 1997 he took a year to travel to the great museums of Europe to see firsthand the original masterworks,
to witness the great traditon of painting which he had inherited. During this year he visited over 40 museums in a dozen countries, focussing primarily on Western painting but also travelling to Egypt and Greece to view the classic creations of antiquity.
Upon returning to Maui, he took a job as an art consultant in one of the many art galleries in Lahaina in order to learn the business of art.
Lahaina afforded him many opportunities to advance his career as a professional painter, one being able to study with Dario Campanile.
Campanile is a realist/surrealist painter who is known for his mountain scene that graces the opening of
the films of Paramount Pictures.
It was at this time that Brandon Kralik began selling his own original oil paintings and his paintings entered the collections of such notable celebrities as Steven Tyler and Carlos Santanna.
It was also through his contacts in Hawaii that he was introduce to the Norweigan painter,
the Kitsch painter, Odd Nerdrum.
It was then that he realized his high school art teacher had been wrong.
The so called secrets of painting hadn't been lost, but, rather dismissed
as inconsequencial by the super structure of Modern Art.
Through many conversations around the fireplace it became clear that what Kralik wanted to do with his painting, that is to follow in the great painting tradition of Carravagio, Rembrandt, and now Nerdrum,
was quite different from what has come to be known as "Art".
There are a good number of groups and individuals around the world today who champion
the techniques of classical painting. Who admire and strive to create paintings that can stand beside the great masterpieces of the Rennaissance. Who understand that oil painting, as a craft, has the power to move souls,
to engage the spirit, to address what it means to be human beings, having human experiences.
Kraliks paintings are very much alive. They have a prescence that is both arousing and contemplative,
both sensual and mysterious. His figures are portrayed with dignity and a sentimentality which remind us of the honors and challenges of, not only our own existence, but also of those who have come before us,
and those who are destine to follow.
These paintings are a bridge between the past and the future.
They are NOW.
While painting in Norway, Brandon Kralik met Nanne' Nyander, who is also a skilled painter,
and now the two of them live together in Sweden where they their home and painting studios.
