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And the light dies down...
Published: 4/9/2012 9:03 AM
Last Modified: 4/9/2012 9:03 AM


Before.


After.

I once visited a Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery – the one that existed for a brief time in Tulsa’s Woodland Hills Mall.

It was a retail space that had been subdivided into small rooms, all done in – if memory serves me right – dark woods and forest greens, with the dozens of images on the walls isolated under display lights.

The day I was there happened to be when the shop was playing host to one of the many “illuminators” that the Kinkade corporation would send out, to add touches of actual paint onto the surfaces of the mass-produced images, which would increase the price of those particular items.

I use the word “price” rather than “value” deliberately. Value in art is completely, totally subjective. My wife, for example, sees absolutely no value in Ellsworth Kelly’s painting “Red,” but the people who run the Dallas Museum of Art think enough of the piece to have purchased it and keep it more or less on permanent display.

During the time I was in the gallery, I watched the “illuminator” as she exchanged small talk with some of the people expressing interest in making a purchase, punctuating her conversation with precise, tiny daubs of paint – usually white or some various of shades of yellow – to an image that had been imprinted on canvas-like material.

The items in the store, as I recall, fell into three broad categories: regular prints, whether on paper or the much more expensive canvas; “illuminated” prints, such as the one that was being touched up here and there by the artist in the store that day; and prints that were advertised as being “illuminated” by Kinkade himself.

The store had only a single, actual Thomas Kinkade painting on display – most emphatically NOT for sale – of a sailboat at sea. It was the only Kinkade painting in the place in which the subject matter was not a static scene, devoid of any obvious human presence. Oddly enough, with its obvious brushwork, it looked completely out of place among all the other smoothly surfaced items on display.

Kinkade, who died Friday at his California home, marketed himself as “The Painter of Light” (a term once applied to the great English landscape artist J.M.W. Turner – Turner, however, did not think to trademark the phrase as Kinkade did).

He envisioned his paintings – fanciful cottages, nostalgic village streets, gardens at sunset, all of which had at their center some kind of golden glow emanated from windows, lanterns, horizons – as a tonic for “the darkness people feel” in their lives.

And Kinkade’s approach was also a response – though one less obviously stated – to art that eschewed the conventional, that sought to challenge its viewers rather than comfort them. His paintings offered the world nothing new, nothing surprising. He sought only to reinforce whatever positive emotions a viewer might already have.

That his ideas about art were also tied into Kinkade’s professed religious beliefs helped make his work popular with manufacturers of Bible covers and other such items.

That he believed humanity’s “basic values” sometimes were best expressed by including images from Walt Disney animated films in his paintings proved that, of the two persons he claimed to be his greatest influences, the marketing genius of Walt Disney was obviously more important to him than the ability of Norman Rockwell to portray time and place, as well as emotions light and dark, in images accessible to all.

It was this hyperactive marketing of Kinkade’s images in just about every imaginable form – blankets and pillowcase, snow globes and calendars, even a mini-community that was supposed to mimic the look of a Kinkade village – that ultimately proved to be the undoing of part of his commercial empire, although Kinkade himself was not accused of wrongdoing.

Nor did he suffer much financially during the time when a number of lawsuits were filed against Media Arts Group by those who had invested in opening Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries, hoping to sell high-priced, exclusive examples of the artist’s work, only to find themselves competing with outlets such as Wal-Mart, which might have the exact same image for sale at a comparatively miniscule price. The only difference was the image at Wal-Mart was printed on a throw pillow.

Which gets back to why Kinkade became popular in the first place, and why his output might possible endure in some fashion.

The appeal of Thomas Kinkade and his vision about art was all about the surface. The man certainly had talent – his work shows a facility with line, composition and color – and he put his abilities to the use he wanted: to make a great deal of money from the pictures he painted. He wanted to be a “best-selling artist,” the way Stephen King is a best-selling novelist or Elvis Presley is a best-selling singer.

So, like any other businessman pushing a product, he discovered his market and exploited it for all it was worth, churning out prints and tchotchkes by the tens of the thousands.

And millions of people bought them, because Kinkade’s pictures spoke to them – perhaps in a quasi-religious way (Kinkade often included chapter-and-verse notations in his images), perhaps as emblems of a nostalgia for a time and place that never had been but even so looked prettier than the here and now, perhaps simply because they had a couch that was the exact same purple as the flowers that ringed one of the cottages in one of Kinkade’s offerings.

Perhaps even some experienced what Kinkade stated he wanted them to experience when looking at his pictures – a feeling of light, of the darkness of modern life being pushed away ever so slightly, ever so temporarily.

Kinkade once stated, in an interview with the TV news magazine “60 Minutes,” that he believed his work would endure and that the work of people such as Picasso would fade into obscurity.

I’m not going to touch that statement. But I will say this: in the interest of full disclosure, I wrote this piece with the only Thomas Kinkade object in our house sitting on the desk next to me. It is a coffee cup my wife was given as a present by one of the former co-workers some years ago. It bears the image of something called “Lilac Cottage: From a Thomas Kinkade Painting.” When it is filled with a hot beverage, such as this morning’s coffee, the black squares that are the cottage’s windows slowly change to lattice-covered windows through which one can see a dull ochre color.

The base of the cup proclaims this object as a “Genuine Kinkade.” And I believe it. Because it proves that as long as religious bookstores, Hallmark shops and the Disney Corporation exist, and as long as the deities of marketing hold sway over our society, Thomas Kinkade and his pictures will live on.




Reader Comments 3 Total
Jayhawk Ken (10 months ago)
What a carefully crafted piece, Mr. W. The restraint you displayed is eager to be given full voice, but your tasteful tact reins it in. This certainly is one of the most honest "tribute" pieces I've seen on the master of mass marketing.
drudge2 (10 months ago)
America will always be a place where the creators of kitsch can make a very comfortable living. I'm sure Thomas Kincade is already trading yarns with C.M. Coolidge as they await the arrival of Margaret Keane and Samuel J. Butcher.
208228 (10 months ago)
Mr. Watts - your article is right on the... money,
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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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