I’m going to expose a clearly flawed aspect of my personality, but I kind of like some of Kinkade’s stuff.
There, I said it. I don’t know anything about the man or his marketing techniques, and of course, technically, a his paintings can be off (perspective, as has been mentioned) but that kind of adds to it for me. I’m referring to cottage house type paintings. The lighting and colors and flowers and being a bit askew make them feel kind of like fairy tales to me. Sort of mystical and ethereal - the sort of place where there the inhabitant might be a beautiful good witch but also maybe a beautiful cruel one who is luring you in to eat you. (And not the fun kind of being eaten, either.)
I don’t actually own any Kinkade prints, but I could see having a particularly enchanting one hanging on a wall.
I don’t really see how people can think they’re purely glurge. They’re a bit too much not to be a little creepy, and you can’t really go wrong with beautiful-creepy, if you ask me.
Holy god, click on the link to the right, where the Kink himself explains the painting. The guy is a living, walking infomercial. Seriously, he could be selling salad shooters on QVC. I like how he holds the paintbrush to remind his potential customers who he is.
“This painting took over 300 hours to complete.” I wonder how that’s calculated. One hour per employee, or what?
The really sad thing is that the few frames they show from Disney’s “Pinocchio” are much nicer-looking than the Kinkade painting. Look at this background from the actual film. Isn’t that something? I would put that on my wall.
Kinkade, you clown, Monstro the whale was bigger than Geppetto’s boat. Otherwise he couldn’t have swallowed it whole, could he?
Also: Kinkade’s four girls are named Merritt, Chandler, Winsor, and Everett. So somebody in that family is at least a little creative, anyway.
“Hi, I’m Everett the girl. This is my sister Winsor. We grew up living with Thomas Kinkade. Don’t fuck with us if you want to live.”
There’s an animation gallery in L.A. that was selling a watercolor background from *Pinocchio *a few years ago. It was absolutely awesome. If I’d had $10K laying around I would have bought it in a heartbeat. Disney has employed some amazing artists over the years.
I must disagree with regard to Kinkade. Clearly, he is going for realism, excepting the realm of color and light which are deliberately exaggerated into what to me is pure kitsch at best*. I’m quite sure he means for the racetrack, for example, to look real. Absolutely there is great art and are great artists who deliberately eschew real perspective–I’m sure I need not name names here–but if that’s what Kinkade is going for, I damn him doubly so, because what he gets is this slight warpage all over that gives the impression he simply lacks technique. His little fantasy cottagescapes end up looking creepy and childish because of it. He’s not creating a new perspective that adds something; he’s failing to achieve what he sets up the viewer to expect. Someone like Picasso would insist you have to get the rules right before you can break them; one gets the impression that Kinkade never could get them right, or maybe never understood why learning them is important for his preferred genre. It’s sad, really.
If he’s not even trying, he’s definitely working in the wrong genre. You don’t make painting cozy little images of cottages and chapels and castles without needing to get perspective right. The culture that values these is one I understand quite well. Kinkade simply doesn’t or can’t get it right.
Interestingly, those images from Pinocchio get correct perspective correct to a far greater extent than Kinkade, even in their clearly cartoonish point of view.
But I still say the damning thing of Kinkade isn’t his lack of craft in and of itself. It’s his sticky-sweet, kitschy aethetic that’s really condemns him to a special circle of art hell. Combine that with poor craft, and that simply enhances the miserable quality of his art.
*Despite having said this, while it is deliberate, his goofy use of color and light is really screwed up, so I’m not letting him off the hook. There are lots of painters who exaggerated light and color to marvelous effect; Kinkade’s use of same is so clumsy and blundering it’s really just laughable.
astorian, go up to a chef and tell them you think that their food is almost as good as McDonald’s.
Then when they react negatively to this, you can point out that they knew what kind of food was popular when they got into cooking, so any complaints now are just jealousy at someone else’s success.
I liked Kinkade when I was 12. I also thought at 12 that the greatest thing about growing up was that I would get to eat ice cream for dinner. Neither appeal anymore, for the exact same reason.
I will say that if someone liked Kinkade enough to own his merchandise and display it in their home, I wouldn’t look down on them. Okay, they’re into easy art. That’s okay. If they were to argue that he was a master in his craft, then I might have to take a step back and re-evaluate the relationship.
Oddly enough, my dislike of Kinkade has very little to do with his art. The man strikes me as a douche. Everything I’ve ever see about him reinforces him as a self important, narcissistic douchebag. The fact that he looks likethis and got a guy who looks like this to play him in a movie speaks volumes of narcissistic douchebaggery.
All you have to do to turn that painting into a masterpiece is draw a bright red line from Pinocchio’s head to the Cottage of Fire. Then it becomes “The Angry Living Doll Burns Gepetto Alive With His Heat Vision.”
What I was gonna say: how the hell can you paint fighter jets roaring over a racetrack full of speeding cars while fireworks erupt in the background and a packed stand full of drunken rednecks cheers on the whole sensory overload - and make it dull, static and lifeless? Nothing is moving in that picture: there’s no sense of life, or noise, or speed, or energy, or anything.
I think he kept adding more and more stuff, hoping the next thing would bring the kind of life and excitement to the piece he was hoping for. Hence, the absurd busyness.
I believe the reason his perspective is so wonky is because he’s trying to force everything in that he can. He’s not so much concerned about detail or realism as he is about filling the canvas with obnoxious, sugary, figurative and poorly contrived content. He’s trying to make sure that wherever your eye lands, it’s seeing something. Not just seeing anything, but something in particular that he forces in there, whether it belongs there or not.
It’s 100% pure pandering kitsch — uninspiring, unoriginal, and unimpressive.
Now a little story…
I visited my MIL & FIL a few years ago, as they live out of state in AZ. We stayed at their place, and it was our first time visiting. My wife and I were slapped in the face, everywhere we turned, buy huge Kinkaide prints that were dripping with nausea. It was like each one was painted with frosting. Every wall in the house. And my Step-Mother-In-Law, felt obliged to talk about him for what seemed like hours. When she said, “and they call him The Painter Of Light™…” you could almost hear the tee-emm in her voice, and she waved her hands in a gesture of awe. I had to look at that vomit for 10 days. And guess what my wife’s father does for a living?
He’s a preacher.
I wish they would have bought a clue before buying all those prints and gaudy frames they put around them. They are definitely drinking the Kink-Aide.
Beauty is, and always will be, subjective. We would never be able to get everyone to agree on what makes a woman physically beautiful, or to agree that a particular woman is physically beautiful. But if a woman has been horribly disfigured, buried in shit, set on fire, and reduced to an ill-defined mass of goo in an unfortunate transporter accident, I think we can agree that it takes a really messed-up individual to say there’s anything physically beautiful about her.
And that’s exactly how I feel about “Thunder Road”. We can disagree about what constitutes “good art”, but if you think this is an example of it I don’t feel the least bit inconsistent when I say that you’re simply wrong.
(I also have to wonder why they’re setting off fireworks during the daytime, and think that someone ought to go wake up the air traffic controller.)
This may very well be true. However, this non-art snob doesn’t like him because I consider his work to be insipid, ham-fisted, repetitve, and despite all the shiny colors, quite dull.
But, since this is his intention, and he seems to be delivering on his intention, who are you to say that that is bad art?
How can anyone define what good art is?
For example, let’s take this quote from ZebraShaSha from another thread
Well, if Kinkade never intended for the art to be aesthetically pleasing to art connoisseurs, you can hardly be surprised that it isn’t.
He has a specific intention, he lives within a specific sub-culture with its own aesthetic, and he delivers on that. How can you judge that this is “bad art”?
BTW, I don’t like his paintings, and I don’t consider them to be good art. I’m just arguing that if people make allowances for aesthetics in art from other cultures (e.g. Japan, Africa, etc) that we might not “get” and might not jive with our set of aesthetics, then we should make allowances for aesthetics in art from sub-cultures (e.g. the NASCAR crowd, the Bible-belt people) that we might not “get” and might not jive with our set of aesthetics. It is inconsistent do otherwise.
Unless you want to argue that the NASCAR crowd or the Bible-belt people are devoid of all taste in matters of art, so whatever their sub-culture decides is good art is inherently wrong. If so, on what basis can you make that decision about such a large group of people, and why can’t someone apply it to, say, a culture outside the US?
Because, I don’t believe his intention is to produce bad art. In fact, I wonder if he even cares if it’s considered good or bad at all. He’s in it for whatever sells. So, he knows there are more people out there with incredibly poor taste than good, and panders to them by filling the canvas with as much sentimental pap as he can to maximize the impact of the sale to the tasteless masses. If he knew there was 4 million dollars in painting velvet leprechauns, I sincerely think he would.
Good and bad in art is always subjective. So when we say “Kinkade is a bad artist”, it should be understood that there’s an unsaid “… within my aesthetic frame” tacked on at the end.
As you point out, it’s perfectly possible to construct an aesthetic frame that values Kinkade’s particular qualities (bright splashy colors, busy composition, sentimental subject matter) over other qualities (perspective, balance, subtlety, wit). If that frame works for you, great! However I would argue that if you limit yourself exclusively to that frame you’re cutting yourself off from lots of potentially rewarding artistic experiences.
But what you may discover if you try to move beyond the Kinkade-friendly frame is that when you start using other frames that allow you to “play nice” with other works from other traditions … Kinkade doesn’t travel well. He’s a hot-house flower. His stuff only works within a very narrow and very specific frame. If you try to fit it into a broader aesthetic it doesn’t work any more. Within other frames his work starts to look really inferior, for a whole host of reasons, some of them listed in this thread.
Now some non-Western art is like this. If you want to appreciate it you need to try to get your head into the narrow frame where it works. It can be an interesting experience trying to configure your head so a piece of unfamiliar art makes sense. But with Kinkade its not much of a stretch to get into the frame. It’s part of our culture and it’s not much of a reach. So a common response is “meh, dull”.
So, basically Kinkade’s painting painting works in a cultural context where craft is unimportant, and insipid, shallow fantasy is valued. Sure, I’ll buy that. If your artistic virtues are sloppiness, gaucherie, and a crude kind of sticky nostalgia, Kinkade is terrific.
Wow, because in the side-by-side comparison of the Water Tower in Chicago, I preferred the one the author didn’t like. The one he likes has much less detail, like the artist didn’t want to put much effort into it.
