A Christmas card arrived during lunch today. I opened it and beheld (for the first time, believe it or not) the upchuck-inducing art of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Lite.
Not only did this cloying kitsch-fest of a picture, execrable in so many ways I can’t beging to count them, assault my eye. But to peg out the cheese-o-meter, the greeting card people had impregnated the goddam thing with green glitter!!1!!11 Which promptly got all over my hands, my cold roast chicken, and my face.
To top off this perfect black comedy from life, the guy who sent me the card is a complete schlemiel whom I (deliberately) haven’t spoken to in five years, and who I’m guessing hasn’t sent out Christmas cards in at least that long.
Seriously, I was so bummed after looking at this picture I had to search YouTube for cute cat videos, pound a quick Jack rocks, and take a nap.
Perhaps it would help to imagine that everyone in that scene is being attacked by a deadly gaseous lifeform and are having all the hemoglobin drained from their red blood cells.
Nor am I. But “Holiday Gathering” includes what appears to be a 1935 Ford truck – and this is where I draw the line. Fuck with the Thirties and you fuck with me.
But… but… the little doggie in the “painting” is is mid-step. The dog is in MID-STEP!! Do you understand me?? It is very cute!!! the dog has been CAPTURED in TIME in the MIDDLE of a STEP! His cute little paw is raised AND the little paw’s shadow in the snow is raised too!
Obviously some of you have not grasped the heart-warminess of this… um… piece.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never understood the hate associated with Thomas Kinkade. A bit pretentious, maybe, and it’s certainly not high art, but he paints a nice enough scene.
I was in charge of decorating the tree at work this year. Many of the bulbs we used had glitter decoration on them. By the end of the day, I looked like I’d just finished taping the “money shot” in a pixie porno.
Thank you, Mr. Kinkade for sharing your creative methods with us.
Actually, I’d like to think of the image as made at around 3 PM in southern Texas about two weeks after Major Kong took his last ride. Thorium-Cobalt G sure is sparkly.
I agree with Guinastasia. The painting that the OP linked to is exactly the sort of thing that ought to be on a greeting card, and, as such, there’s absolutely nothing upchuck-inducing about it. (Except for the orgy going on inside the house, in the upstairs room on the left. And the fact that I wasn’t invited.)
On the other hand, if you want to Pit Thomas Kinkade himself, the hype surrounding his art, or glitter (especially on a roast chicken sandwich), I have no argument with that,
Is it just me, or is that fence really messed up. You can see where the corner is supposed to be, but there isn’t a corner there! It looks like space is bent around the fence.
I’ve got a Kincade that’s not full of gingerbread. One of his early works that’s a street scene in the city in the rain. Has all his trademark “painter of light” details, but is not at all like a kid’s book illustration, actually more of a somber mood. I guess they didn’t sell like the cottages.
Why the heck would they use green glitter to decorate a winter scene? Isn’t snow traditionally more of a white color, at least in idealized depictions? I’m not trying to second-guess the Painter of Light’s artistic instincts, but the overwhelming majority of glitter-enhanced holiday art accepts the fact that white or lightly irididescent mixed colors are best for depicting the reflection of light from fresh snow. Uniformly green glitter sends more of a disturbing “Bartholomew and the Oobleck” vibe. Granted, I’m from Pittsburgh, so I’m accustomed to atypically colored snow, but I don’t expect that most greeting card purchasers would share my broadminded aesthetic sense.
Seriously, how screwed up do you have to be to mess up the color of snow? Frankly I suspect this represents some kind of double-bookkeeping scam from somewhere in the middle echelons of the Kinkade factory. Probably a couple metric tons of green glitter were lying around as surplus from an earlier project, and somebody decided to write themselves a nice holiday bonus.
“Yeah, the greeting card division needs to requisition funds to purchase $35,000 worth of green glitter. Because… er… the newest line of cards need to be much… greener. And sparklier. Last-minute decision, straight from Mr. K himself. You got a problem with that, go ahead and argue with him about it.”
