Thomas Kinkade
William Thomas Kinkade III was an American painter of popular realistic, pastoral, and idyllic subjects. He is notable for achieving success during his lifetime with the mass marketing of his work as printed reproductions and other licensed products by means of the Thomas Kinkade Company. According to Kinkade's company, at one point one in every 20 American homes owned a copy of one of his paintings.
Kinkade described himself as a "Painter of Light," a phrase he protected by trademark. He was criticized for some of his behavior and business practices; art critics faulted his work for being kitschy. Kinkade died as a result of acute intoxication from alcohol and diazepam at the age of 54. Reportedly, about 600 of his 6,000 unpublished works have been published posthumously.
Early life
William Thomas Kinkade was born in 1958 in Sacramento County, California. He grew up in the town of Placerville with a single mother. She was so poor that they often could not afford heating or lighting. He graduated from El Dorado High School in Placerville in 1976, and attended the University of California, Berkeley and ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.Some of the people who mentored and taught Kinkade prior to college included Charles Bell and Glenn Wessels. Wessels encouraged Kinkade to go to Cal Berkeley. Kinkade's relationship with Wessels is the subject of a semi-autobiographical movie released during 2008, Christmas Cottage. After two years of general education at Berkeley, Kinkade transferred to ArtCenter College of Design.
Career
For the summer of June 1980, Kinkade traveled across the United States with his college friend James Gurney. The two finished their journey in New York and secured a contract with Guptill Publications to produce a sketching handbook. In 1982, they produced a book, The Artist's Guide to Sketching, which was one of Guptill Publications' best-sellers that year.The success of the book resulted in both working for Ralph Bakshi Studios where they created background art for the animated feature movie Fire and Ice. While working on the film, Kinkade began to explore the depiction of light and of imagined worlds. After that, Kinkade worked as a painter, selling his originals in galleries throughout California.
Artistic themes and style
Recurring features of Kinkade's paintings are pastel colors and brilliant illumination of the scene. Rendered with idealistic values of American scene painting, his works often portray bucolic and idyllic settings including gardens, streams, stone cottages, lighthouses, and Main Streets. His hometown of Placerville was the inspiration for many of his street and snow scenes. He also depicted various Christian themes, including the cross and churches. His country scenes rarely depict people and he was frequently asked questions about that.Kinkade said he was emphasizing the value of simple pleasures and his intent was to communicate inspirational messages through his paintings. A self-described "devout Christian", he believed that he gained inspiration from his religious beliefs and his work was intended to include a moral dimension. Many pictures include specific chapter-and-verse allusions to Bible passages.
In 2009, he painted a portrait of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the cover of that year's race program which included details in the crowd, hiding among them the figures of Norman Rockwell and Dale Earnhardt. He also painted the farewell portrait for Yankee Stadium. Concerning the Indianapolis Motor Speedway painting, Kinkade said:
File:Home in the Woods 1847 Thomas Cole.jpeg|thumb|The Hudson River School has been recognized as a precedent for Kinkade's idyllic, sentimental scenes.
Artist and Guggenheim Fellow Jeffrey Vallance has spoken about Kinkade's devout religious themes and their reception in the art world:
Essayist Joan Didion is a representative critic of Kinkade's style:
Didion compared the "Kinkade Glow" to the luminism of 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt, who sentimentalized the infamous Donner Pass in his Donner Lake from the Summit. She saw "unsettling similarities" between the two painters and worried that Kinkade's treatment of the Sierra Nevada, The Mountains Declare His Glory, similarly ignored the tragedy of the forced dispersal of Yosemite's Sierra Miwok Indians during the Gold Rush, by including an imaginary Miwok camp as what he calls "an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God's glory."
Mike McGee, director of the CSUF Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton, wrote of the Thomas Kinkade Heaven on Earth exhibition:
Authenticity
Kinkade's production method has been described as being "a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade." He reportedly designed and painted all of his works, which were then moved into the next stage of the process of mass-producing prints. It is assumed he created most of the original, conceptual work that he produced. Kinkade employed studio assistants to help create multiple prints of his famous oils. Thus while it is believed that he designed and painted all of his original paintings, the ones collectors were likely to own were printed factory-like and touched up with manual brush strokes by someone other than Kinkade.Kinkade is reportedly one of the most counterfeited artists, in large part because of advances in affordable, high resolution digital photography and printing technology. Additionally, mass-produced hand-painted fakes from countries such as China and Thailand abound in the U.S. and around the globe. In 2011, the Kinkade studio said that Kinkade was the most collected artist in Asia but received no income from those regions because of widespread forgery.
Business
Kinkade's works have been sold by mail order and in dedicated retail outlets. Some of the prints feature light effects which are painted onto the print surface by hand by "skilled craftsmen," touches that add to the illusion of light and the resemblance to an original work of art, and which are then sold at higher prices. Licensing with Hallmark and other corporations has made it possible for Kinkade's images to be used extensively for other merchandise including calendars, jigsaw puzzles, greeting cards, and CDs. By December 2009, his images also appeared on Walmart gift cards.Kinkade was reported to have earned $53 million for his artistic work during the period 1997 to May 2005. Around 2000, there was a national network of several hundred Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries; however, they began to falter during the 2007-2009 recession. During June 2010, his Morgan Hill, California manufacturing operation, which reproduced the art, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, listing nearly $6.2 million in creditors' claims. The company, Pacific Metro, planned to reduce its costs by outsourcing much of its manufacturing.
Criticism and controversy
Reception
Although Kinkade was among the most commercially successful painters of the 1990s, his work has been criticized. Soon after news of his death in April 2012, author Susan Orlean termed it the death of a "kitsch master". Also during April 2012, journalist Laura Miller lampooned Kinkade's work as "a bunch of garish cottage paintings".Kinkade was criticized for the extent to which he commercialized his art, for example, by selling his prints on QVC, a home shopping TV network. Some academics expressed concerns about the implications of Kinkade's success in relation to Western perceptions of visual art. In 2009, Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club wrote, "To his detractors, he represents the triumph of sub-mediocrity and the commercialization and homogenization of painting... perhaps no other painter has been as shameless or as successful at transforming himself into a corporation as Kinkade." Among such people, he is known more as a "mall artist" or a "chocolate box artist" than as a merited painter. Rabin later said that Kinkade's paintings collectively are "a maudlin, sickeningly sentimental vision of a world where everything is as soothing as a warm cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows on a cold December day".
In a 2001 interview, Kinkade said, "I am really the most controversial artist in the world."
Business practices
Kinkade's company, Media Arts Group Inc., was accused of unfair dealings with owners of Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchises. In 2006, an arbitration board awarded Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello $860,000 in damages and $1.2 million in fees and expenses due to Kinkade's company " to disclose material information" which would have discouraged them from investing in the gallery. The award was later increased to $2.8 million with interest and legal fees. The plaintiffs and other former gallery owners also made accusations of being pressured to open additional galleries which were not viable financially; being forced to accept expensive, unsalable inventory; and being undersold by discount outlets the prices of which they were not allowed to match. Kinkade denied the accusations, and Media Arts Group had defended itself successfully in previous suits by other former gallery owners. He himself was not singled out in the finding of fraud by the arbitration board. In August 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI was investigating the issues, with agents from offices across the country conducting interviews.Former gallery dealers also charged that the company used Christianity to take advantage of people. "They really knew how to bait the hook," said one ex-dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They certainly used the Christian hook." One former dealer's lawyer said, "Most of my clients got involved with Kinkade because it was presented as a religious opportunity. Being defrauded is awful enough, but doing it in the name of God is really despicable." On June 2, 2010, Pacific Metro, the artist's production company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, one day after defaulting on a $1 million court-imposed payment to the aforementioned Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello. A $500,000 payment had been disbursed previously.
From 1997 through 2005, court documents show that there were at least 350 independently owned Kinkade franchises. By May 2005, that number had more than halved. Kinkade received $50 million during that period. An initial cash investment of $80,000 to $150,000 is listed as a startup cost for franchisees.