Thu 16 Mar 2006
Painter of Blight
Posted by Marlow Harris under Artists, Pop Surrealism, Popular Culture, Real Estate
A California builder established a “Thomas Kinkade themed community” near San Francisco called The Village at Hiddenbrooke. This housing development was conceived in an attempt to make the nostalgic, soft-focus world of the paintings a reality for fans. I pictured thatched cottages, soft-focus towns glowing like Jack-o-lanterns, ivy-covered arbors, dells and fields of flowers. What it was, however, was just a standard tract-home housing development as described by Janelle Brown in her story -Ticky-Tacky Houses from “The Painter of Lightâ„¢” In it, Brown points out that it ain’t exactly Olde Quainte Village….
Boing Boing notes the LA Times just printed a character-assassinating cover story on Thomas Kinkade, self-professed “Painter of Light”.
Kinkade is one of the most successful “artists” painting today, selling millions of dollars worth of kitschy cottages and lighthouses to unsophisticated buyers. He’s sold his soul to marketing and his paintings now grace potholders, calendars and tissue covers. He has a “factory” where giclee’s and prints are touched-up by hand to add highlights to his thatched cottages, arbors, and flower-laden gardens.
To read the story in the LA Times, you have to register, but it’s worth it.
When RoqlaRue had it’s parody show “Painters of Blight” , curated by Kipling West, Erin Norlin and David Miller, they documented it on the blog, Painters of Blight. It’s hilarious.
Thomas Kinkade and The Future of Architecture
The Future of Branded Living Space : Megachurch as Minitown
Jesus Has a Summer Cottage? Inside Thomas Kinkade’s Blinding Gazebo
Reuben Kinkade — Painter of Stuff
4 Responses to “ Painter of Blight ”
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September 20th, 2006 at 6:59 pm[...] Painter of Blight from 360 Digest [...]
March 18th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
The most searing hatchet job on Kinkade — taking him on from an artistic, rather than a celebrity, viewpoint — was “Art for Everybody” by Susan Orlean in The New Yorker (2001). She writes “it’s hard to distinguish one Kinkade from the next, because their effect is so unvarying — smooth and warm and romantic, not quite fantastical but not quite real, more of a wishful and inaccurate rendering of what the world looks like, as if painted by someone who hadn’t been outside in a long time.”
The article is on Orlean’s website: http://www.susanorlean.com/articles/art_for_everybody.html
March 18th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
That’s a great article. Thanks for sharing that… !
January 25th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
good article from the new yorker. i laughed at a few parts, especially when he explains his opinion about himself.
“Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s the point: My art is relevant because it’s relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I’m relevant to real people.”
i never liked kinkade’s paintings, and the fact that he is so bombastic is sort of satisfying.