Thomas Kinkade paint by numbers

What happened here is HE SOLD OUT. A much-used epithet, but appropriate in this case. He's made a ton of money by being what comes out to a prostitute.

Lighten up, Frances.

He's making a living that makes a lot of people happy. That no more makes him a whore than anyone else with a job.

I don't feel one way or the other about his work, but a lot of folks take genuine pleasure from his pictures. I suppose it would have been better if he'd spent his life drunk and stoned, dying of cyrhossis, only to be recognized after his death by a bunch of putzes who coo over his art only because everyone else is doing it.

Since I've generally been content with my daily lurking I haven't made comment on your blog until now. However with the advent of what appears to be your first and, God most graciously willing, your last Thomas Kinkade post I thought it only right that I protest the very mention of this "artist", especially the thoughtless display of "Hollyhock House" (the second in [his] Flower Cottages of Carmel Collection" GAWD!!!) that accompanies the post even before one has time to finish one's second cup of coffee, a prerequisite for the alertness required to quickly adjust one's senses to displays of horror and the subsequent dexterity to click away promptly. My aversion to Mr. Kinkade is probably bound up in my own self-contempt. He reminds me of an earlier time in my life when his art graced the corners of my own uneducated and pedestrian palette when my sophistication was defined by White Zinfandel and syrupy furniture from the Bombay Company. In order to embrace Mr. Kinkade's workmanship I haphazardly ran roughshod over the earlier formation I gained as a voyeur beside my grandmother's easel. She painted in oils, not for profit or fame, but because when she painted she lost herself in the process of creation. I am not an artist so I cannot fully convey what that feeling must be like but I can say that what I cherish so profoundly in her art, generated under a deliberate and measured pace, being not only a backhanded gift of arthritis but a product of her training in slowness that framed many in her generation, I could never find behind the incessant distortion that Mr. Kinkade's parade of shlock delivers to the masses. I think that at one time Mr. Kinkade was indeed an artist. He certainly took the time to form a foundation of sorts but somewhere along the way he decided to build upon it a misshapen skyscraper that scrubs profits from every square foot instead of a warmly lit cottage that welcomes our sincere contemplation. But before I end this with a bloody "artist of light" under my boots I need to say that my own life is usually carried away to places that I never envisioned because I want more stuff at the least possible expense and labor. If I had Mr. Kinkade's nascent abilities I too would probably sell out quickly rather than plumb the depth of my craft which might prove to be both painful and profitless. The fact is that I am doing that very thing now in a myriad of ways, from work to parenting, as I trade in what I believe to be true for the convenience of inaction. O wretched man that I am.

To fiddler Jones' comment,

Someone having a distinct style is not uncommon, nor a mark of a great artist. Challenging people to find his weakness is dumb when people knows he creates a product. His best efforts of natural drawing/painting are never seen. The one portrait I have seen him draw, the proportions are off. You can't hide bad drawing in portraits and figures. Many art intellectuals like warm and fuzzy paintings, it's that his represent what is insincere of real life. And he whores that to death. And again with the brightening, warming of walls. That's not what real painting is about, it's about the painting, not what it'll do for your living room. Some people just don't like fake things, and if that means were all dark and dull, I wish there was more of it.