Kinkade's world of parody

The Painter of Light's work is quaint, nostalgic and trite -- and an inspiration for satirists everywhere

Published April 9, 2012 8:45PM (EDT)

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.


By Katie Ryder

Katie Ryder is a freelance writer and a contributing editor for Guernica. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, NewYorker.com, and others.

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Thomas Kinkade