See, if Kinkade made greeting cards and that sort of thing, that would be fine-because that’s what his paintings look like. Greeting cards-NOT serious, GOOD art.
I don’t think it would reproduce well and I always find his landscapes so cluttered. I see his work, and I find they have a carbon-copy feel to them, unless one is set on an ocean.
I haven’t painted a thing in ages, so YMMV. I may yet be more partial to pen and ink, as I have no idea when i am going to get some more paints.
I am at this very moment looking through a bunch of Ruskin’s writings about art and just came upon a hilarious bon mot i have to share. Ahem:
“Very bad pictures may be divided into two principal classes-- those which are weakly or passively bad, and which are to be pitied and passed by; and those which are energetically or actively bad, and which demand severe reprobation, as wilful transgressions of the laws of all good art. The picture before us is of the last class.”
(although I think TK is of the first class)
Nooooooo Waaaaaayyyy!
That’s hilarious!
TK definitely fits the second class in my book - “willful transgression”, that’s great!
So whose work was Ruskin discussing?
I have to ask - are you an artist yourself? Painting JFK salt shakers out there in CA? Admit it!
This one will crack you up, I think - I have this oil painting I did last summer of a bowl of potato chips. No masterpiece or anything, but it was fun (I often paint junk food). So the potato chips I was looking at, well, I kinda left them sitting around. Forgot about them would be more accurate. The other day I was messing around w/some acrylics & ran out of canvas so I was rummaging around - presto, found those potato chips. So now they’re red, green, blue, brown, etc. I call them “paint chips”. If they hold up I’m gonna do some more - I think Pringles would work better, more uniform in shape.
They smell bad, though. Greasy paint whiff, ick.
I had never heard of TK until maybe 8 or 10 years ago, when I walked by the store (I thought it was a real art gallery) on Newbury Street in Boston. There were some paintings on display and I, even with my untrained eye, thought they had a strange, paint-by-numbers quality to them. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then someone told me that the place wasn’t a real gallery, that he had a whole bunch of stores, and the paintings were mass-produced. I somehow then thought that TK wasn’t a real person - that he was just a marketing name. Like Betty Crocker. A fake person made real by some publicity department, to give people the warm fuzzies when they gazed upon their mantel decoration. I didn’t realize for years that the Painter of Light (Vermeer is rolling over in his grave) was actually a living being.
Art is subjective, but come on. His paintings are just plain bad.
One last post & I’ll let this one go (or at least quit hijacking it myself - the other “what is art” conversations have taken up where this leaves off & it’s very exciting).
Yesterday my father was in town to see my sister’s musical & stopped by my place. And of course I had to leave my most recent painting in the living room where he could either comment on it or trip over it.
And I said I’d started a gratifying rant in SDMB re: Thomas Kinkade and I explained its nature. And my father, the amateur photographer with 5 cameras and apprx. 10,000,000 photographs in his apartment, the man whose opinions dominated the early years of my life, said “What’s wrong with Kinkade? He makes a lot of money.”
I’ve been reading Ruskin recently, too, and hope no one minds if i butt in here:
I’d have to look it up to see if he had any particular artist in mind, but I suspect he was referring to several different artists from the eighteenth century: esp. Claude Lorrain, Canaletto, and other landscape painters whom he despised. He especially hated these artists because the Victorian art establishment seemed to favor them while dissing Turner–Ruskin really made his name in the art world by defending Turner against the critics.
Now, to some extent, Canaletto was kind of the Thomas Kinkade of his day–painting the same kind of scene over and over again (in C’s case it was Venetian canals, hence his name) and churning them out like a xerox machine. By Ruskin’s time, though, Canaletto’s work was already lessening in popularity, so he was kind of a straw man for Ruskin to attack.
Ruskin’s criticism of Claude, on the other hand, was way over the top. Today, Claude is acknowledged to have been one of the best landscape painters in the history of art. It’s also rather ironic that Ruskin attacked Claude so viciously when Claude’s influence on Ruskin’s beloved Turner was so evident; Turner, for his part, never made it a secret that he deeply admired Claude’s paintings.
OK, so this is kind of an art historical hijack. But i think what it shows is that the whole issue of who is and who isn’t a good artist has been openly debated in past eras, and eventually people reach a general consensus–whether right or wrong–on these artists’ general worth.
Lest I be misinterpreted, let me assert that Thomas Kinkade is no Claude Lorrain. He’s not even as good as Canaletto–not even close. He’s a sham, a hack, a fraud. The consensus is already in on him, and it is that TK is a miserably bad artist–so bad that it flatters him to call him an artist.
That’s why his trademark really should be “Painter of Shite.”
Way to come back and not explain what the fuck you meant.
Sheeh.
Not to unnecessarily prolong this exercise in personal esthetics, and not to detract from what seems to be a general consensus that Kincaid’s productions are excreta, it seems to me that Norman Rockwell is getting a bad rap here.
In time I have no doubt that in time Rockwell will be regarded as one of the great technical painters of the 20th century. Remember that the guy was working shortly after the First World War, that for a big hunk of the century his Saturday Evening Post covers were all the painting that a large portion of a literate society even saw. During a time that advant garde painting was struggling to do something, anything, new Rockwell was content to do the old story telling painting very well. While he did some stuff that was highly emotional, even moving (for example the painting of the little Black girl escorted by US Marshalls and his portrait of JFK) the policies at the SEP and their demands for his work pretty well restricted his obvious virtuosity and skill to their format calling for amusing story telling and no controversy.
In my book Rockwell’s painting of the town band practicing in the back room of a barbershop, as seen through the street window, is an accomplishment that the 17th Century Dutch interior landscape painters would have admired.
The judgment will not be in on Rockwell until art critics can get over their bad feeling about the pedestrian, middle class Republican magazine that carried his work to the public.
http://www.jinwicked.com/artihate/kinkade.html
http://www.jinwicked.com/en/art/cartoons/jinzillavskinkade.html
My hatred for Kinkade stems not from the crappy, uninspired nature of his artwork, but the fact that he is a con-man, plain and simple. He puts Bible verses on his artwork and adopts this good Christian guise as a marketing gimmick (some communications I’ve had with people inside his organization have strongly suggested he is NOT what he makes himself out to be, if you get my drift). He is STEALING from ordinary people by leading them to believe they are getting a quality product that will appreciate in value, when they purchase a $1200 piece of PAPER with a few globs of white Liquitex on it. Having personally framed many of his canvas-transfer prints myself, I can personally attest that there are never less than six individual signatures on the back of one, for the people doing each step in the process of making it – and none of which are his. I highly doubt he personally signs everything “signed” by him, simply because the volume of “signed” merchandise is so great that he would have no time to paint the originals (which he no longer even sells, but is keeping solely for himself – possibly the only work anyone COULD get of his that will actually be worth something one day.) He puts his name on things like Michael Jordan on a box of Wheaties and then charges a small fortune for it. If his craptastic art was hurting no one but himself, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but having had to help people choose frames for, and listen to them talk about the expensive print they just got, hoping it will be worth something one day – and personally having to bite my tongue because I know they got reamed up the ass over it – that is his crime, in my book. He does not even paint for selfish reasons, at least not in the sense that “my art is about me.” He paints for his stockholders – his company, his “art” is a publicly traded company. Just like Enron he does everything he can to inflate his profits and worth in the short term, at the expense of the long-term viability of his company. Just now are the gallery owners and other people who have been duped by him beginning to see it. Unfortunately it will be all the little people who spent a month’s salary on one of his crap prints that ultimately pay the price for his deception.
Buy a Kinkade because it matches your couch or looks good next to your Bay window. But buy the cheap, reasonably priced $15.00 poster, and don’t expect it to be worth anything. Hell, my mom likes the pictures, she doesn’t really understand why I hate him, only that I told her she was forbidden to own any of his work. I got a nice $30.00 art print done by some guy named Cervantes, that looks remarkably like a Kinkade, and framed it for her last Christmas. She was happy, it looks great with the couches and over the fireplace, and I didn’t have to spend money to support that collasal asshat Painter of Crap.
Oooh, do spill the rumors you’ve heard, jin!
Hehehe!
I’ve just gotten a lot of comments from current and former employees of his company that indicate he is not the God-fearing, Christian family man that he makes himself out to be. In other words, a hypocrite.
But being a womanizing asshat doesn’t sell artwork or make you famous.
Well, unless perhaps you’re Picasso.
Oh, sorry-- the Ruskin quote was just about some random chump in one of the Academy yearly shows. Took the book back but it maybe have been a MacDonald or something.
Canaletto-- very expensive post cards.
Yeah, well, Kinkade is laughing all the way to the bank. Who gives a fuck how all you pompous artfucks “feel” about his crap? Kinkade doesn’t. And I think that those objecting to Libertarian’s “racial slur” reference know EXACTLY what Libertarian means. Your objection and false puzzlement are as phony as Kincade’s treacle.
Um, yes, you’re probably right. I think that’s what most of the posts attacking him in this thread are about. Thanks for keeping up, though.
**
Do you know what he means? Could you explain it to me? I honestly don’t have the first clue.
And I don’t have the second clue. Please do explain.
I seem to have to address the vegetables, carrot and Green Bean!
Well, I haven’t really been “keeping up”-- I had to sort of skip through some of the repetitive stuff, so I probably missed some real important comments. As for the “racial slur” conundrum, by gratuitously having one specific ethnic group mindlessly painting K’s money-making products, the OP implied a less than admirable trait–the willingness to work mindlessly for K’s money-making industry–to that whole group, which is, as we know, in reality made up of individual human beings, who may or may not possess that less than admirable trait. And given the qualities atttributed to “Asians” within the very real reflexively bigoted strain in American culture (e.i., there are billions of them who look different from us and work energetically like ants at who knows what–could be communism, could be K’s money-making pictures–to undermine the one, true, and most desirable culture of all–the American Way of Life!), to have referred to them they way the OP did can understandably be taken as a “racial slur.” Vegetables may have difficulty inferring from the foregoing just what is wrong with that (forgive the “phylum,” or is it “genus”–no, maybe it’s “kingdom”–slur :D). See what I mean, veggies?
Huh?
It was a reference to sweatshops, dude. The OP said “Asian kids,” implying that the paintings are done by child labor. Children don’t work in sweatshops out of “willingness,” they work there because they have no choice. The implication was not that Asian kids are bad people for making Thomas Kinkade pictures, it was that Thomas Kinkade is a bad person for exploiting them.
Jeepers, cleops, ever consider switching to decaf?
Or since you’ve obviously got some issues with the tenor of this discussion, you might want to start a new thread. Here’s a suggested working title:
I Hate that Mothefucking Cocksucking Thomas Kinkade Thread & Refuse to Pretend Otherwise
Yours pompously,
E_K
Oh jesus,
Here’s some quotes from the ass. Or the painter of ass. i hope its not a rehash, but this shit is just disgusting! From a USA Today Article
what does he mean by using his talent in a significant way? Would that be like, ooohhh, I don’t know a fragrance, theme park, or anything else?
vomit. Okay now that I have evacuated my stomach, I have to admit that Andy Warhol isn’t exactly someone to brag about being an heir apparent to.
Jesus, this man is a fucking ass!! I didn’t know about this clown untill today, but he is a fucking ass!
Holy fucking shit… I am speechless.
This asshat’s arrogance is stratospheric