Obviously, someone in this thread didn’t wake up in love this morning.
I don’t hate Kinkaide, but his work is has a marked sameness to every painting. Good painters have a bigger range.
I find it highly amusing that so few can apparently spell his name correctly.
Of course it’s art by definition, but it’s simply regarded by many to be really, really poor. Kinkade’s aesthetic is maudlin at best, the technique is mediocre, and the extreme factory-like commercialization of his is odious.
Check out this painting. Really, it shows appalling taste. Notice how his inability to accurately realize perspective; he basically attempts to cover this up with the warm, gauze-like quality he smears over the entire painting. The castle, the bridge, the little trail, the road: none of it agrees. I’m not sure whether the overall aesthetic or inability to properly draw perspective is worse. I guess they go hand-in-glove. Also, the light in this painting is bizarrely inconsistent; for someone who prides himself on such, this is really, really poor. The lamps are shining warmly in near-twilight, but the sky above is bright as high noon. The rainbows make no sense whatsoever relative to the apparent location of the sun in the sky.
Here’s another example. Notice once again how the lighting is really screwed up. The perspective on the the “chapel” isn’t quite as mangled as the example above, I suppose because it’s a much simpler structure, but consider the gaudy, hyper-unrealistic use of color. He’s not trying to be avant-garde here, he’s just so tacky he wants to have both the leaves of Autumn and the flowers of Spring in the same scene, just as the lighting in the previous example tries to combine the brilliance of noon-day sun simultaneously with lamp-lit dusk. It’s a ludicrous, tasteless over-saturation of color and a gratuitous abuse of light. What’s that smeary blob at the top, anyway? A bird, I suppose.
Last example. Here’s the infamous “NASCAR” painting. It’s horrible on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the absurd busyness of the whole scene, which goes far beyond any actual race. The cars, the fireworks, the screaming jets, the blimp, the planes trailing American flags, the berserk fans, the sky just on the edge of a sunset–it’s all so over the top, it’s hard not to laugh at it. Once again, the gauzy smear over everything tries to convey warmth, I suppose, but mainly what it does it attempt to obscure the mangled perspective. Compare the cars in the pit with those on the track to see what I mean, not to mention the building on the far right side itself. If this were a photo, these glaring perspective problems would reveal at once a crudely Photoshopped image. Notice also the stand on the left side of the track, and the race officials and how oddly proportioned they are to the cars below. They look like they’re about nine feet tall.
Some little inconsistencies like these are no problem, really, but in Kinkade’s paintings, sloppiness just jumps out all over the place. Proper perspective isn’t everything, and many great artists distort it to excellent effect, but one gets the feeling that Kinkade just doesn’t have the skill to do it and tries to get by without it, like a saxophonist who uses too much vibrato to try to distract from being badly out of tune (Kenny G, I’m looking at you.) His use of color reminds me of someone who cannot realize when they’ve put way too much frosting on the cake.
Really, though, the most damning element in Kinkade’s paintings is certainly his grotesquely saccharine style. He’s aiming for something warm, comforting, and profound, but really it’s just cloying and sticky, like cheap candy on the edge of melting all over everything. The fact that he is so very bad, so very popular, and so damnably commercial is what causes all the loathing.
Last edit: it’s interesting to note how much better Bierstadt’s use of perspective is than Kinkade’s. Sad, really.
That painting has always bothered me. Here is a church in the middle of a forest without even a footpath leading to the front door. Who attends that church, bears?
It looks like there’s a little path leading upwards away from the chapel toward a little overhang over the river. There’s one of his mysteriously illuminated lamps there as well. The perspective is way out of whack, so it’s easy to overlook.
I wouldn’t want to be there during the winter thaw.
It seems to me that he learned how to paint out of an instruction book, and has never veered from rigidly adhering to those principles since.
Kinkade claims to be The Artist of Light but he fails to use light dramatically. Every object on the canvas glows but there’s an overall flatness. Bierstadt knew how to use light. Some of his stuff is even a bit corny–but he had a huge vision.
Kinkade’s Disney series really brings on the kitsch. And some young artists like playing with that stuff. Kitsch fans have been haunting resale shops for years, picking up dreadful amateur canvases which they sometimes “improved.” But the amateurs didn’t know better; Kinkade does.
I commented that a co-worker’s new calendar was not by Thomas Kinkade; her cubicle had been a Kinkade shrine. (Which had not prompted any retching noises on my part; I do know how to be nice.) She’d discovered that his “originals” were anything but & was feeling ripped off because he sells his stuff as investments.
If somebody just wants something pleasant for the wall, figurative art is still being created. If they don’t feel like making a real investment, there are thousands of fine prints out there–covering centuries of art.
Let me be the first to proclaim him a true master at sucking all the vitality and life out of a picture that should have been full of it. The people all look like lifeless zombies, and the cars aren’t just frozen in motion. They look parked. Blecch.
I hate being the one to defend Kinkaide. However, he has changed over the years. When I first noticed him he was pretty much a straight up landscape painter. He did have a very good command of light in his paintings. If you liked realisim (maybe slightly hyper-realism) his early work was good. I particularly liked his mountains at sunset. I would not mind having one of those earlier paintings. I think along the way he found that the paintings with cottages and lighhouses started to sell more. He started painting more and more towards the audience that was paying him the most. Eventually his work evolved into the Hobbiton on acid that it has become.
Kinkade doesn’t lack talent or training.
He chooses to paint the way he paints today. And market those paintings with words that match the visual glurge. And those prints “touched up” by others to pass as paintings.
Oh I’m not defending how he is today. I’m just pointing out his work wasn’t always like that.
They’d have to be asbestos bears, because that building is clearly on fire inside.
To be fair, he is marginally better than Bob Ross. But it is a very small margin.
And with Bob Ross you know that painting could be done in, oh, 3 minutes.
Not at all. Most artists (at least the 300-or so that I know personally) love to see a talented artist succeed; it gives them hope, a dim promise that someday *their *work might make them rich and/or famous.
Most artists (again, the ones that I know) despise Kincaide not only because of his utter lack of talent, but the fact that the product of his talentlessness sells the way it does. That situation sends the message that no matter how hard you work, no matter how talented you are, unless you have a one-in-a-million marketing strategy and are willing to sell your integrity, you are probably destined to labor away in obscurity.
Heh, I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the same people who (and I think rightly) are pissed at Kincade’s stuff because it is schlock are adamant that there are no objective standards to judging the merit of art. 
MrDibble beat me to it. Mrs. Bubbadog put up one Kinkaid in the house and I put a stop to that right away by describing the shear hell of being caught in a building that produces a bright visible light to the outside world in daylight.
Everytime we would see another Kinkaid somewhere I would comment to the wife,“Do you think there were any survivors?”
I stand in wonder of anybody who uses the term “Artist of Light” to describe somebody who paints light so horribly.
A Kinkade rant was one of my early Pit rants, as I recall.
What particularly galls me is his adoption of the title “Painter of Light,” a phrase which he also trademarked. Long before Kinkade rolled into the art world with his marketing tactics and his twee cottages, scholars used that phrase for great masters, like Vermeer.
You don’t really get the artist’s mindset, do you?
Do you honestly think that most artists are chasing the almighty dollar?
Bob Ross wasn’t holding himself out as A Great Artiste to whom we should reverentially send large bales of money. (But those paintings he slapped together on TV still had more life & spirit than Kinkade’s overpainted epics.) He was trying to show that painting could be fun. And he encouraged people to pick up their brushes & see what* they* could do. Of course, you could (& still can) buy brushes & other supplies from his company.
And Bob always seemed to be a pleasant guy; Kinkade has been known to act like an asshole. The annals of art history provide many examples of great artists whose behavior is or was less than exemplary. For those less than great–I’d rather have a drink with Bob than with Tommy Boy. (Too late, alas.)
Note: I added the bolding in the quote below for emphasis.
Ain’t that the truth? First damn thing I noticed. I’m not a NASCAR fan, but I used to watch tons of CART, and I’ve been to a number of races. We had something we called the “Bic award” we’d figuratively give out to particularly deserving individuals - there’s more pelted men at these things than you can shake a stick at.