Mine's in art, which explains why I've spent over thirty years as a firefighter.
My take on Kinkade is that first, anytime an artist captures this much attention, there's something about his work that should be understood. Here's my take. I'd be interested in your reaction to it.
Kinkade is technically a good artist, although there are many others with as good or better technique. In his early work, he showed an excellent sense of design, and my guess is that he studied the impressionists, but particularly Monet.
Although it's easy to dismiss his work as greeting cards on steroids, there is something about it that appeals to a lot of people. If we dismiss the premise that only the avant-gard and the New York glitterati have the right to have an opinion about art, we need to figure out why he touches so many people. My take is that he is an early Disney cartoon for the masses. People who like his work view it as the emotional equivalent of slipping into a warm tub full of water with incense candles burning. It creates a world that never was, a fantasy of the cottage in the woods, mountains or seaside. Today, insanity is just another form of intellect. As more and more people want the sanity of a steady job, a home, a hearth and a family, they seek work like Kinkade's to have a quiet place to linger for a while. They don't want the intellectualism, self-hatred and political motivation behind the majority of current "fine art." They don't want intellectual discussions about art. They want something to soothe their sensibilities for a few moments.
In music, Kinkade's equivalent would be Karen Carpenter, as far as his work goes. Carpenter pushed the sweetness until too much was not enough. Her work sometimes bordered on self-parody. In the art world, he's more like Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield. Davis took an initially excellent cartoon strip and mass-manufactured it using a stable of unknown artists until people became numb to the initial appeal of the strip. Davis struck while the iron was hot, and instead of attempting to grow or find new directions, he simply mass-produced what sold, becoming a manufacturing plant, not a cartoonist.
The intense hatred of Kinkade's work comes from two different factions. Some hate Kinkade for the same reason they hate Norman Rockwell. Rockwell similarly painted scenes that confirmed home and hearth values. There are important distinctions between Rockwell and Kinkade. Rockwell is a better illustrator and artist. Rockwell also believed his work. He was one of the common people, and his work was done from the viewpoint of someone who believed in what he was doing and truly loved the people in his paintings, many of whom were his neighbors and friends. Kinkade is, IMHO, far more cynical. I don't think he's moved by his paintings, but sits outside and uses them more to manipulate the viewer than invite the viewer into a world in which he believes.
Other people who dislike his work are more like me. Bob Ross admitted he was a schlock artist. He had no pretensions of greatness. He did his happy trees and had fun and if you liked it that was cool, and if you watched him to make fun of him, well, he didn't take himself so seriously that he worried if the "cool kids" laughed at him. Kinkade does the same paintings over and over, but operates with pretensions of grandeur that his work simply doesn't merit. The light in his later works is preposterous. If you're pretending to paint a realist image, at least make a light source. The deer shouldn't glow golden in a night scene without a light source. Deer don't glow in the dark unless they're at Chernobyl.
Anyway, wandered too long on this topic, but as a student of media, I strongly believe that even if an artistic endeavor doesn't really have that much artistic merit, once it achieves a certain level of popularity, someone should try to study it with a critical eye, simply to understand what part of it touches people. Kinkade's work invokes strong feelings in people, both pro and con. That means it's powerful. Like it or hate it, his work is significant.
The history of art is replete with tension, and pendulum-like swings between the rational and the emotional, and of course Kinkade's work certainly falls into the latter category. His use of light, color, subject matter, and composition elicit a visceral, emotional response, but it's very subtle as the responses he seeks to elicit are ones of tranquility and solitude.
While one might think that conservatives would be more drawn to art that appealed to more cerebral, rational sensibilities, I think a lot of conservatives (as exhibited by the apologia on this thread) are drawn to two aspects of his work. The first is the idealized nature of his work. Conservatives who believe in such things as natural law, unalienable rights, etc. hold that behind the imperfections of this world, there is a perfect universe to be sought, and Kinkade provides a window to that world. The second draw Kinkade exploits is nostalgia. I would suspect most Kinkade aficionados are in the 50+ age bracket...people who recall simpler times, and like to have a token or two hanging around on the wall to remind them of it. I think there's also some business savvy on Kinkade's part here, as that target demographic usually has a few more $$ to spend on art than your typical 20 or 30 something.
It's kitschy, but to each his own. I personally steer clear of the comparisons to Kinkade and Rockwell. For me, Kinkade's work is a snapshot of an idealized world or situation. Rockwell's work may also exploit a little of the nostalgia, but it's far more intellectually engaging as his visual puns and cues compel the viewer to complete the story in their mind. This, coupled with the near technical perfection of Rockwell's draughtmanship place Rockwell far more in the "rational" camp, although his works admittedly do evoke emotional responses...The emotional responses however, are arrived at not through the image itself, but in the mind's completion of the story behind the image.
Just my $0.02 :-)
It is possible that K isn't painting merely from an earthly perspective but rather from his idea of what heaven may be like or the new earth. He may be trying to capture just in part the light of God which doesn't have a source such as our light but rather just is even as The LORD is I AM and is the light that lights New Jerusalem.