”There’s over 40 walls in the average American home,” a business manager for the artist Thomas Kinkade once said, ”and Thom says our job is to figure out how to populate every single wall in every single home and every single business throughout the world with his paintings.”
Kinkade’s luridly idyllic landscapes, full of quaint cottages and glowing firelight, already hang in an estimated one in 20 US homes. ”In the often hurried, unsympathetic and complex world we live in, the images Thomas Kinkade paints offer a place of refuge,” his company’s literature purrs. ”A place where the transient things of life give way to the things that matter most … faith and family, a loving home and the people who know and love us.”
Art critics have long dismissed his work as a kitsch crime against aesthetics. But now the world has grown even more ”unsympathetic and complex” for the artist, who describes himself as a devout Christian and has trademarked his ”Painter of Light” soubriquet. In court documents and other testimony, he has been accused of sexual harassment, fraudulent business practices and bizarre incidents of drunkenness including a habit of ”ritual territory marking” that involves urinating in public places.
‘Misleading picture’
A court-appointed arbitration panel has ruled in favour of two former owners of Kinkade-branded galleries, ordering his company to pay them $860 000 for breaching ”the covenant of good faith and dealing” and failing to disclose pertinent business information.
The panel found that his firm ”painted an unrealistic and misleading picture of the prospects of success for a dealer”, while using religious language to foster an atmosphere of trust.
Kinkade won two other claims, but six more are pending, including one from a Michigan man who says he lost $3-million in assets, along with his marriage and most of his possessions, after the galleries he owned went broke. Other former employees and associates of the artist — in court testimony and in interviews with the Los Angeles Times — recounted how he had fondled a woman’s breasts at a company event, and lashed out at an ex-colleague’s wife who tried to help him when he fell from a bar stool.
Two former employees, Terry Sheppard and John Dandois, told the panel of further examples of Kinkade’s unpredictable behaviour: bringing disorder to a Las Vegas performance by the illusionists Siegfried and Roy by repeatedly yelling the word ”codpiece” from his audience seat, and urinating in public — in an elevator and on a model of Winnie the Pooh at a Disneyland hotel. ”This one’s for you, Walt,” Sheppard claimed the artist said as he did so.
Business empire
The allegations threaten to destabilise a business empire that made Kinkade at least $53-million in personal income between 1997 and 2005, thanks to a complex system of art marketing. The cost of a Kinkade print changes depending on whether it is on paper or on canvas, and unsigned or signed; certain versions are ”retired” from the market at critical moments to give them scarcity value. A team of ”master illuminators” at Kinkade’s galleries charge yet more to add real paint to his prints, enhancing his trademark glowing light effect on works with names such as Sunset on Lamplight Lane and Cobblestone Christmas. The pictures are also available in numerous other forms, printed on teddy bears, cushions, lounger chairs, T-shirts and Bible covers. Three years ago a residential community modelled on his painted homes was opened in California.
The artist — who once said of Picasso that ”he had talent but didn’t use it in a significant way” — has acknowledged that he went through a bad period.
”If during this period I ever offended anybody, I am sorry. Anyone who knows me knows I always try my best to be loving … the good news is I learned many valuable lessons from that phase of my life,” he wrote in an e-mail to gallery owners this month. He blamed ”disgruntled ex-dealers” for launching ”media attacks” on him, but acknowledged in a separate statement that ”there may have been some ritual territory marking going on”.
He denied the harassment allegation, but said in a deposition: ”You’ve got to remember, I’m the idol to these women who were there. They sell my work every day, you know. They’re enamoured with any attention I would give them. I don’t know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me. I don’t recall what was going on that night.”
In his e-mail he said that long after ”this absurd negativity” had subsided, ”I will still be here, sitting in front of my easel, trying my best to share the light.”
‘Such insistent cosiness seems sinister’
The critics on Kinkade
”A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent cosiness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire. The cottages had thatched roofs, and resembled gingerbread houses. The houses were Victorian and resembled idealised bed-and-breakfasts … ”
Joan Didion
”[One painting] features mountains and quiet shadows and the purple cloak of sunset, but it could just as easily have featured a lavishly blooming garden at twilight, or maybe a babbling brook spanned by a quaint stone bridge, or a lighthouse after a storm; it’s hard to distinguish one Kinkade from the next because their effect is so unvarying — smooth and warm and romantic, not quite fantastical but not quite real, more of a wishful and inaccurate rendering of what the world looks like, as if painted by someone who hadn’t been outside in a long time.”
Susan Orlean, the New Yorker
”There’s always been starter art, but Kinkade is the lowest form of starter art I’ve ever seen.”
Kinkade on the critics
”The number one quote critics give me is, ‘Thom, your work is irrelevant.’ Now, that’s a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s the point: My art is relevant because it’s relevant to 10-million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture.” – Guardian Unlimited Â