Thomas Kinkade paint by numbers

Ahhhhh....after our meanderings through the culture wars this past week, finally a cultural issue that we agree upon. TGIF!

Um, er, ah, hardly. You can long for simplicity and things with timeless quality because you have a genuine respect for the enduring and for the past (crunchy), or because you have constructed an ethic which pretends that because you can't immediately see before you the troubles of modern life when you look at old stuff, those things weren't there. So it's soothing (as opposed to genuinely comforting) to look at old stuff (Kinkade.) There's a BIG difference. One looks to the past for what answers it might have had that remain true today, the other for an escape from reality based on a false premise.

A very trenchant Christian criticism I once read of Kinkade is that his works don't show a redeemed world, but one untouched by evil. The thought of a world untouched by evil is appealing, but denies the truth of redemption.

Rod

If you want to focus on the warm glow, I would say yes. Please remember that he endures the same unfair criticisms that you endure. You've written about the intangibleness of ccism quite beautifully, and have been pretty harshly criticized. In a sense you’ve tried to politicize the “warm glow”. He's a serious Christian no?

Before everyone takes a deep breath to start laughing at his work over a leaked technical note. Ask yourself a question, does VF compares his work to porno? They do. Does VF ever criticize porno? Do they laugh at porno too? I doubt it. I believe that they consider porno more sophisticated and pleasurable than Kinkade. For the secularist porno is cool and legitimate pastime. But please laugh with VF at the Christian and his Christian porn art. I am actually surprised that Kinkade does not have a Wendell Berry series.

You keep writing about the looming depression and crash of consumer culture. Someone laughing now might find themselves and their family living in a cardboard box during a serious depression. I suspect in those circumstances that Kinkade would look pretty good. Perhaps we should leave the Branson crowd to their iconographer.

Pentamom, just to clarify, I think there's a huge distinction between the kind of aesthetic I embrace and what Kinkade is doing -- and you've beautifully drawn it. Thank you.

JohnT, responding to your comments in light of what Pentamom said, I find Kinkade's art to be kitschy and unappealing, and fundamentally a lie. It's design, really, not art. I might prefer to look at it than at much modern art, because it is at least recognizably human, but that doesn't make it true or beautiful. That Kinkade is a Christian doesn't make him a good artist. Nor does the fact that he was criticized by Vanity Fair, with its own corrupt value system, therefore validate Kinkade's work, any more than the fact that Sarah Palin was initially attacked by moral cretins make her a credible choice for the vice presidency.

Well, I was never aware that being a Christian was synonymous with being a good artist or having a good aesthetic. And I don't think Rod was making that point either. I don't know of a single place in that post where Rod casts doubts on TK's religious convictions.

Now, if it is being asserted that to say he is a bad artist is the same thing, this could be interesting. I can't draw stick figures (literally). So, does that mean I could never convert, or that the process of conversion would mystically endow me with artistic taste and talent? Which would make the process (if I could just make myself do so through act of will) an intersting experiment.

Well, yes, in the way that both a fresh endive from your garden AND a cheeto are crunchy...

Rod
Using a political analogy is shifting context. Pentamom’s comment is quite good and so is yours. My criticism isn’t about art, it’s about your choice of targets in a target rich environment. It is like picking on the little guy who’s on your football team. He may suck but he is still on your team. You’ve been consistent about this stuff so I’d bet a days pay that you attacked VF for their Hanna Montana cover. I’m not going to dig through the blog to see, but that is a good thing. So why not keep the firepower directed at the enemy?

Regarding Kinkade, I am not a Kinkade scholar and I’ve only seen a handful of works. until it was just explained to me recently, and confirmed by the man himself, I thought his work was meant to be forward looking not nostalgic. Why? Because there was nothing remotely close to it in the past. That doesn’t mean we should have contempt and hurl feces at his work. I don’t have contempt for Andy Warhol or Normon Rockwell either. I appreciate some of Warhol’s nostalgia about his soup cans. If what I understand is really true I guess he was really poor, and soup satiated his hunger as a kid. I don’t know if that is true, but I like the story. So when I see a soup can poster I catch a glimpse the warm glow.

For VF, I suppose if he painted quaint cottages wearing only black leather chaps and a bullwhip up his bum he’d be considered a master.

I'm reminded of a story my philosophy professor told when I was college. He was at a meeting with members of the philosophy department and the art deparment. They were trying to cook up some sort of interdisciplinary thing or other. Anyway, he got into an argument with art professor over the definition of art. In desperation, he picked up a plastic tape dispenser and threw it on the floor so hard that it broke and then said, "I made that. I like that. Is that art?"

The art professor said, "Yes."

I dunno, I guess there is something about this post and conversation that I am completely missing.

I look at the Kinkade image that accompanies this post and think to myself, "Huh, a landscape of a stone house with some landscaping. Maybe in a forest grove."

It does not inspire me to think about theology or cultural issues.

What am I missing here? Is this question related to my admittedly sensate point of view?

The pervasive criticism of Kinkade is his hollow sentimentality/nostalgia. Well, that and how Hobbits are the appropriate inhabitants of the world he draws.

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.

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.