Salon.com > Thomas Kinkade

Kinkade’s world of parody

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:45:00 +0000

Thomas Kinkade, the self-anointed Painter of Light™, and artist behind the once-profitable later-fraudulent Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries enterprise, died unexpectedly on Friday of natural causes. Kinkade’s appeal to his fans, as Laura Miller wrote on Salon today, is in its “aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort” – the same things that make his work a giant, glaring bull’s-eye for parody. On dozens of websites, artists and Photoshop dabblers have taken Kinkade’s images of glowing, pastoral peace and added … we’ll call them contradictory splashes. We've put together a slide show of some of the most memorable.

Thomas Kinkade, the George W. Bush of art

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:55:00 +0000

News of Thomas Kinkade's death arrived on the same day I received in the mail a vintage teacup on which I had spent a ridiculous amount of money. It has a cottage painted on it. Kinkade, whose work has long exerted a morbid fascination for me (to the concern of all my friends), specialized in cottages. So some part of me understands the appeal, I guess, but, damn: Those paintings make my corneas hurt. And yet, I could barely stop looking at them.

Kinkade was only 54, and his family told the media that he died of "natural causes." This comes after years of reports of drunken public misbehavior: cursing at people who tried to save him from falling off bar stools, heckling Siegfried & Roy, grabbing a woman's breasts at a publicity event and, most memorably, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel while proclaiming, "This one's for you, Walt!" There were DUI arrests. Also, his manufacturing company declared bankruptcy two years ago, and former franchisees of the once-ubiquitous Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries won settlements against him for fraud.

This Week in Crazy: Thomas Kinkade

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 15:01:00 +0000

The Christmas cottages have dimmed their lights while millions of little azaleas droop their Pepto-pink heads. Thomas Kinkade, king of landscape kitsch and self-billed Painter of Light™, has fallen upon dark times.

When news broke this week that Kinkade, 52, was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, it was only the latest stumble for this icon of saccharine religious sentiment. It's as if one of his wondrous Christmas sleighs zoomed right past the town gazebo and plowed into a crowd of cherub-cheeked carolers. (Which, were it a Kinkade painting, might be titled, "God's Littlest Martyrs.")

Just a few weeks ago, Kinkade's manufacturing arm filed for bankruptcy, claiming to owe creditors more than $6 million. This follows several years of bad news for Kinkade and his business, including million-dollar court rulings against him in favor of ex-Kinkade gallery owners, and reports of an FBI investigation into whether Kinkade's business systematically defrauded franchise owners, who claimed he "used the Christian hook" to dupe investors. (Picture an apple-faced couple solemnly handing over their life savings in an old-timey bank. Title: "Our Blessed Sacrifice.")

Ticky-tacky houses from “The Painter of Light™”

Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:35:00 +0000

To reach The Village at Hiddenbrooke, A Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ Community, you must first cross the San Francisco Bay Bridge and drive 30 minutes northeast of the city. You pass the cozy liberal bastion of Berkeley, the smoke-belching oil refineries of Richmond, and cross the girdered Carquinas Bridge before entering the tract-housing grid of suburban Vallejo. Just beyond the Marine World Africa USA theme park -- next to a Smorga Bob's restaurant and a Rite Aid -- there is a freeway signboard with the slogan "Get Away, Every Day. The Village at Hiddenbrooke," which features photographs of green grass, placid golfers and the steak dinners they presumably eat for dinner.

The Village at Hiddenbrooke lies just over the hill from Vallejo, where the city peters out into cow-dotted farmland. Hiddenbrooke is a 2-year-old development of 10 planned communities clustered together on 1,300 acres, with a golf course at the center. Thomas Kinkade's village is its most recent, and most high-profile, addition. Its opening in September drew a crowd of more than 2,000.

The Writer of Dreck™

Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:31:00 +0000

"I am often asked why there are no people in my paintings," writes Thomas Kinkade (The Painter of Light™) in the introduction to a novel, "Cape Light," purportedly written by himself and one Katherine Spencer. The paintings, sold in thousands of mall-based franchise galleries nationwide, generated $130 million in sales last year. According to Media Arts Group, the publicly traded company that sells Kinkade reproductions and other manifestations of "the Thomas Kinkade lifestyle brand," including furniture and other examples of what the company's chairman memorably called "art-based products," his work hangs in one out of every 20 American homes. And if only one person out of every 20 of those Kinkade-owning households is curious enough about the people who inhabit the world of Kinkade's landscapes to buy "Cape Light," he'll have a bestseller on his hands.