Posted on 03/24/2006 6:35:10 PM PST by aculeus
Entrepreneur artist who hangs in one in 20 US homes accused of fraud and drunken antics
"There's over 40 walls in the average American home," a business manager for the artist Thomas Kinkade once said, "and Thom says our job is to figure out how to populate every single wall in every single home and every single business throughout the world with his paintings."
Kinkade's luridly idyllic landscapes, full of quaint cottages and glowing firelight, already hang in an estimated one in 20 US homes. "In the often hurried, unsympathetic and complex world we live in, the images Thomas Kinkade paints offer a place of refuge," his company's literature purrs. "A place where the transient things of life give way to the things that matter most ... faith and family, a loving home and the people who know and love us."
Art critics have long dismissed his work as a kitsch crime against aesthetics. But now the world has grown even more "unsympathetic and complex" for the artist, who describes himself as a devout Christian and has trademarked his "Painter of Light" soubriquet. In court documents and other testimony, he has been accused of sexual harassment, fraudulent business practices and bizarre incidents of drunkenness including a habit of "ritual territory marking" that involves urinating in public places.
'Misleading picture'
A court-appointed arbitration panel has ruled in favour of two former owners of Kinkade-branded galleries, ordering his company to pay them $860,000 (£500,000) for breaching "the covenant of good faith and dealing" and failing to disclose pertinent business information.
(Excerpt) Read more at arts.guardian.co.uk ...
How could I forget the plates!
Where is the driveway and car park area? Do the people who live in these houses come and go by canoe, or what? How are the houses connnected to the main road?
I usually can't stand looking at the visual Muzak Kinkade passes off as "art", but you made me want to play "What's Wrong with this Picture?" Here's my list, so far:
-Not only is the house impossibly close to the creek, the front stoop is at the edge of it! You literally can't walk two steps out the front door without falling in!
-The lights on the Christmas tree and the house are on top of the snow (since they're not covered by it) but the snow wasn't disturbed by the lights being strung.
-The wreath on the front door doesn't appear to be flush with the door itself; it looks angled towards the viewer.
-Why is there an orb of glowing light just behind the tree just right and up from center?
-Whose tax dollars put a streetlamp up next to a creek surrounded by a forest?
Well, I guess we are tacky then as my wife and I own 2 of them one an actual painting and the other a reprint. I painting is in the living room and the first thing you see when guests arrive. We have the dimmer light aimed on it and the ohhs and ahhs that we get from people have made my wife happy. And if she's happy I'm happy.
May I suggest Mr. Rockwell, who was "popular" and looked down on by some as an "illustrator", but also an accomplished painter.
. . . just little matters like perspective, color, correct lighting, and the ability to actually paint human beings and animals (something that Kinkade is totally unable to do . . . )
Thanks for a much needed laugh here. good post!
I hate to burst your bubble, but what you have is "giclee", not an actual painting. It's a printing process that recreates the brush strokes with a thick ink in runs of anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000. The large runs are broken up into "limited editions" of various prices, but all are off of the same print run. The best you can hope for is one that has had highlights added by an art student in the Kinkade Highlight Sweatshop.
Norman Rockwell was good.
My favorite is the Glade air freshener candle. That really touches my soul.
My Campbell's Soup can hangs in my kitchen. To each his own.
Hey, if you're dumb enough to build your cottage on a flood plain...
mark
Note the comments about how the shadows are in the wrong place or absent. He just sticks things in paintings because he thinks the public will like them. I fully expect future paintings to have unicorns frolicking around behind the houses with the glowing windows.
In Kinkade land, nobody leaves, and nobody visits. Billy just sends bad things to the cornfield.
My Campbell's Soup can hangs in my kitchen. To each his own.
What kind of rhetoric is that?
Actually, I DID have for a very small portion of time a 400lb. stuffed Marlin caught in Cabo San Lucas in 91. It was hanging in my hubby's offices, he changed jobs in the dead of the night back in 01. He actually hung it in my living room for one summer while the wily one eye watched me everywhere I went!!!
I subsequently hung it in the garage and there it stays..
Good one.
The cornfield! Bwahahahah!! Good one!
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