Beloved by many, despised by
others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a
dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks.
Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in
history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the
American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial
peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than $100m a year. And
yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or
obscene, but because, well, he specialised in quaint pictures of thatched-roof
rural cottages nestling in leafy groves. "Thomas Kinkade's style is
illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at
any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History
of Art, tells the BBC. "It is schmaltzy pastiches of Disney-style woodland
scenes, complete with cutesy animals and fairy tale cottages. They are… like
the images you find on cheap greetings cards – sugary and forgettable."
And compared to some critics, Mullins is being polite.
His branding was so effective that you
didn't know there was this really complicated and I would say tortured artist
behind it all – Miranda Yousef
These critics don't just consider Kinkade's paintings to
be nauseatingly sickly, they detect something disturbing and ominous about
them. In her 2003 book on California, Where I Was From, Joan Didion summed up
his art by saying. "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." As harsh as that sounds,
Didion may have been more perceptive than she realised. Art for Everybody, a
new documentary directed by Miranda Yousef, shows that the man who called
himself the "Painter of Light" did indeed have a dark side. "His
branding was so effective that you didn't know there was this really
complicated and I would say tortured artist behind it all," Yousef tells
the BBC. "He lived a Greek tragedy of a life."
Kinkade specialised in
quaint pictures of rural cottages, which were loved by many, but despised by
critics (Credit: The Kinkade Family Foundation)
The documentary features audio tapes recorded by Kinkade
when he was a long-haired, bohemian-looking art student in California in the
1970s – and even then, he was already fretting over the question of whether he
could make an impact as an artist while making a decent living. After a stint
in Hollywood, painting backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated feature
film, Fire and Ice, he concentrated on idealised, nostalgic American
landscapes, and he and his wife Nanette sold reproductions of them outside a
local grocer's shop. In the 1990s, he took the idealism and the nostalgia to
new heights, and swapped his rugged vistas for soft-focus pastoral scenes that
a Hobbit might deem a bit on the twee side. Old-fashioned lampposts and cottage
windows glowed. Streams twinkled beneath slender stone footbridges. Bushes
burst with pastel flowers. And cash registers rang. Kinkade didn't sell the
paintings themselves, but the hazy idylls they depicted were soon being printed
on collectible plates advertised in newspapers and magazines. For many
Americans, they were comforting refuges from the modern world.
In Art for Everybody, Christopher Knight, the art critic
of the Los Angeles Times, is contemptuous of Kinkade's imagery. "It's a
cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea," he says. "The
colour is juiced and the light coming from inside those cottages is intense and
blaring." Just as importantly, as far as his critics were concerned,
Kinkade's pictures had nothing to them beyond their superficial decorative
qualities. "They are banal and hollow, with no intent to say anything
meaningful," says Mullins. "Today we would think they had been produced
by AI – designed as if by algorithm to a certain formula." But Yousef
insists that Kinkade's skill can't be discounted. "There were actually
other people who were painting cottages and Christmas scenes and putting them
on plates and all that stuff," she notes, "and the thing is that
Kinkade's were so much better. His works just blew everybody else's out of the
water."
She also believes that Kinkade's paintings, rather than being wholly market-led, were linked to his childhood in Placerville, California, where he was raised by his single mother and only intermittently saw his violent father. "It's a common criticism that his cottages look like they're on fire on the inside. And then you learn that it was because when he was growing up it was always cold and dark in the house when he got home, because they didn't have the money to keep the heat and the lights on. He was painting the thing that he wanted."
Kinkade focused on
idealised, nostalgic American landscapes, before swapping his rugged vistas for
soft-focus pastoral scenes (Credit: The Kinkade Family Foundation)
Kinkade's deprived upbringing, says Yousef, didn't just
inspire his choice of subject matter, but drove him to make as much money as he
could. He and his business partners printed pictures on an industrial scale, as
well as putting his immediately recognisable imagery on furniture and
ornaments, and selling them on the QVC shopping network. They also set up
hundreds of faux olde worlde Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries in shopping
malls around the US, and trademarked the "Painter of Light" brand.
Again, Yousef doesn't see Kinkade as entirely calculating. Having grown up in a
house with no pictures on the walls, "He sincerely believed that art
should be accessible to everyone."
Behind the fantasy
Whatever you thought of the paintings, the mass-marketing
of the work of a single artist was certainly groundbreaking. In interviews at
the time, Kinkade asserted that he was no different from an author selling
stacks of novels or a musician selling CDs. He even declared that by
industrialising his output, he was doing what Andy Warhol had always dreamt of.
But Mullins argues that Kinkade was being "obfuscatory and
disingenuous" by churning out reproductions by the thousand, paying his
assistants to add a few dabs of paint here and there, and then selling these
prints for thousands of dollars, as if they were rare and precious works of
art. "Prints offer an affordable way of buying art by great artists,"
she says. "They retain their value through the limited nature of the edition.
This was never Kinkade's strategy."
Kinkade printed pictures
and merchandise on an industrial scale and trademarked the "Painter of
Light" brand (Credit: The Kinkade Family Foundation)
Still, this sort of disagreement between Kinkade and his
critics was one of his selling points. Art for Everybody features news reports
and promotional videos, in which he tells adoring audiences that his art could
be understood and appreciated by everyone, whereas only the snooty elite could
see anything artistic about Chris Ofili putting elephant dung on his canvases,
or Tracey Emin presenting her unmade bed to gallery-goers. "This is not
legitimate art," he proclaimed. As much a televangelist as a painter,
Kinkade was a born-again Christian who assured his devotees that buying his
work put them on the right side of a political and spiritual line separating
them from decadent metropolitan tastemakers. He trademarked the sobriquet
"Painter of Light", not just because of all the sunlit clouds and
fiery cottages in his pictures, but to signify that he was a force for virtue
and Christianity. "The art world is a world of darkness today," he
thundered. He, in contrast, was "someone who stands up for family and God
and country and beauty". A doughy, plaid shirt-wearing fellow with a thick
moustache, he often appeared on television with his blonde wife and his four
blonde daughters: the embodiment of wholesome, traditional, all-American
values. His fans weren't just paying for his pictures; they were paying to
associate themselves with this proudly conservative persona.
But that persona, like the pictures themselves, was more
a fantasy that Kinkade wished for than an accurate representation of reality.
He was prone to swearing after the directors of his mawkishvideos called
"cut". He relied on alcohol to cope with work pressures. And, in the
documentary, his daughters say that they were encouraged to smile in
videos and personal appearances, but often felt as if their father cared more
about his career than about them. "Thomas Kinkade and his persona and his
brand really cast an extraordinarily long, dark shadow over his entire
family," says Yousef, "and there was a lot wrapped up in perpetuating
the brand and preserving it."
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In order to maintain this brand and the vast business
empire that went with it, Kinkade had to present himself as a Christian
paragon, and he had to complete a stylistically identical painting every month.
That meant that he had to suppress other, more conflicted parts of his psyche.
The strain became too much. In the mid-2000s, Kinkade fell out
with his business partners, and had legal battles with gallery
franchisees. He reinvented himself as a womanising, hard-drinking hellraiser.
After some interventions by his friends and family, some time in rehab, and the
collapse of his marriage, he died of an
accidental overdose of alcohol and diazepam at the age of 54.
The documentary Art for
Everybody explores the dark, troubled person behind the wholesome persona
Kinkade had created (Credit: Art for Everybody)
It was only after his death that his family sorted
through the vault containing his artwork, and uncovered a stash of bleak,
violent drawings and paintings that seemed to express his inner rage and fear
in a way that his cottage paintings never could: a shack in the middle of
nowhere on a murky night; a nun pointing a gun at herself; giant monsters and
distorted faces. Art for Everybody raises the questions of whether these
pictures are more authentic than the ones the public knew about. Do they
express how Kinkade really felt about his difficult upbringing and his
frightening father? Would it have been healthier for him to explore the shadowy
netherworlds in these pictures instead of shutting himself inside his stifling
sylvan cottages, year after year? And were his critics right to say that his
famous paintings were disturbing all along? "One of the things that was
obvious early on," says Yousef, "was that his fans had a
two-dimensional view of him and his critics had another completely different
two-dimensional view of him. I knew there was a three-dimensional person in
there somewhere, and that's what I wanted to try to find."
In some ways, Kinkade was ahead of his time. First, he
was a culture warrior before culture wars were being fought as fiercely as they
are now. As someone who claimed that he was taking a stand for Christianity and
patriotism and against the intellectual elite, he was staking out territory
occupied by more and more in the US today. He was also ahead of his time as an
artist with such a brazen commercial side. "Today we're seeing all these
artist collabs," says Yousef. "There's Yayoi Kusama who's working
with Louis Vuitton, and Tom Sachs is working with Nike, and Kehinde Wiley is
doing a collab with American Express, whereas you see in the movie an MBNA bank
card with a Thomas Kinkade painting on it. He was already doing it 20 or 30
years ago."
Finally, by calling himself the Painter of Light, and by
trading on his pious family-man persona, Kinkade turned himself into a kind of
product. "Look at where we are today with social media, and everybody
being a brand," says Yousef. "He was really ahead of his time with
that. But I think that one of the big questions of the film is, what are the
costs of turning yourself into a brand?" In Kinkade's case, the costs were
unbearably high.
