I first looked at it and thought, “Hmm, a hummingbird sculpture. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a real hummingbird, but it might look good in the right place. Especially if there was a sculpture of a real bird.” Then I took a closer look at the wings. UGH! Man, that sucks.
The other day a little old lady called me up looking into how much some of his crap cost. I helped her find the nearest gallery. She said she was on a limited income, was legally blind, and was hoping it would not be too much. I felt a bit guilty actually giving her the number to that purveyor of horrors, but hey, she is an adult and here eyesight made looking up the number difficult. But it gave me insight into his customers–they are legally blind.
My granny used to love this kind of stuff. Since I knew that her artistic tastes tended toward the garish and glurgeful, I created a few kitschy Kinkadesque pieces as gifts for her. I found it alarmingly pleasant to mimic this style of “art.” There is a perverse thrill to it, rather like mimicking Elvis’s taste in cuisine or doing karaoke versions of Vanilla Ice songs.
I just wanna say, this is the first time I’ve seen a pic of Kinkade himself, and I gotta ask:
What’s with the molestache? I don’t want I guy who looks like that painting my kitsch.
“painting the kitsch”, so that’s what they’re calling it these days…
I worked in a call center for 7 years, and there was a group of trailer-park housewives on my tech team who actually paid for a set of screensavers and wallpapers of Kincade crap. They were absolutely rhapsodic over the stuff. They were devastated when IT wiped every workstation in the place and banned all non-client, non-work software, including desktop themes. ('Course, I was a little upset too … no more X-Files screensavers!) But I was so grateful at not having to look at anymore “Garden of Prayer” glurge.
There are much better examples of Impressionist painting out there. The thing that I hate about Thomas Kinkade’s work is that it’s got that eery-creepy “this is not reality” lighting to it that turns any meaning that the painting might have had into one giant blob of glurge. Sure, it’s great for people with no real taste in art who tend towards inoffensive or religious themes in the works they buy, but it’s really just not for me.
I’m only slightly unsurprised that my future MIL doesn’t have that “stained glass” cross. It would be fitting to her tastes, but, well, it’s not an Orthodox icon, so it wouldn’t be able to be blessed by the priest.