Here’s something I posted almost four years ago, in a thread I started entitled I Hate that Mothefucking Cocksucker Thomas Kinkade & Refuse to Pretend Otherwise :
I so wish I could add a .jpg here, because I’d love to diagram how bad his work is. Tell you what, I’ll go to that buttmunch’s web page - here, let’s look at “Season Hideaway”, on the front page of www.thomaskinkade.com. I’ll try to stick to objective terms.
Start on the upper left, with the sky. I won’t rip on the sky on this one, it’s similar to a lot of good paintings and reminds me of something Parrish would do, soft pastels. I’ve seen sunsets like that. But now notice that it doesn’t really go with the rest of the painting - for some reason, he changes palettes dramatically, going from gentle pastels to garish high-contrast reds and purples. That’s a sign of amateurism - ones approach ought to encompass the whole piece, not switch abruptly and without reason. The point of a realistic painting is to represent a moment in time, so you wouldn’t see two disparate views simultaneously; if you’re doing something else, you’d best be really skilled to pull it off. In his work it’s just illogical.
Okay, about those reds and purples - have you ever looked at a real bush (vegetative, I mean). Foliage doesn’t go from bright to dark like that - or if it did, if that’s the approach he wanted to take, then why is the sky so gently painted? It’s incongruous, you wouldn’t see both things together. The leaves are badly painted, just slap slap slap with a fan brush - no treatment, no looking. Light bounces through shrubs, they’re not just bright at the top and black underneath.
Next let’s look at those rocks. Every one of them is exactly the same. In real life, two similar rocks spaced a foot apart would be treating that sunset differently - you’d see reflected light from the sky on the ones further from the viewer, and their contrast would be higher. The ones closer to the viewer would have a wider range of lights and shadows.
That’s how you describe space using color - you don’t just rely on perspective alone. At least, not in a painting where the sky is treated with such gentle care - if the point was just high contrasts, then the sky would need to be painted that way as well.
Looking at that building closeup, the stones appear to be wallpaper. They have no depth or texture that one would associate with stone, just a medium shade with a darker one underneath it, over and over. Read “Zen and the Art of Motorocycle Maintenance” if you don’t already know how different one brick looks from another. Now that’s not to say that every painting of a house has to have the bricks detailed in such a way - sometimes they’re even more vague in really good paintings. My problem with this one is that it’s half-assed; if you’re going to paint something realistically, indicating each stone separately, then for God’s sake look at the thing. The walls deserve at least as much care as the sky.
Now look at the roof - if I zoom in, I can see the area in the center, just above the window, very clearly. He’s painted the roof using about 4 shades of blue and thrown on a yellow highlight to represent a relationship with the light from the sunset. Again, a half-assed treatment. A roof’s colors don’t actually look like that - there would be relationships to the light from the window, to the vegetation, to the other areas of the building. And the light from the sunset would affect the roof in varied and interesting ways. Not a generic blue tone.
The problem w/Kinkade is he’s painting what people know a painting should look like - walls, roofs, trees, bushes, sky, water. Each of those elements is recognizable as such. But they don’t come together to create a painting, there’s no relationship between them. And that’s what makes a painting art (good art, that’s another issue).
If I were to draw your portrait as just eyeballs, nose, mouth, hair and jaw, without drawing the relationship between them, you would see it as a farce. Things would not be in the right place and you’d instantly say “that’s wrong”. But somehow, because he’s sticking to painting landscapes and because he’s a good talker, Kinkade’s been able to pull off this tomfoolery and call it art. It’s an insult to every person who loves art, every student of art, every aspiring artist, and every accomplished artist.
If you’d like to contrast Kinkade’s work against a supremely competent, living artist, check out Diane Canfield Bywaters. Her landscapes are gorgeous, and they make sense. She’s been the Artist-in-Residence at many of our country’s national parks.
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