Thomas Kinkade, "Painter of Light™," Once Peed on Winnie the Pooh

"Wholesome Christian values" apparently meant driving drunk, fondling women, and fleecing investors.

Here at Cappuccino, there are few things we enjoy more than shining a spotlight on people who are irredeemably awful. Not just awful at what they do, but also awful as human beings determined to enrich no one’s lives except their own.

Low hanging fruit, you say? Sure. But no one can argue that low hanging fruit isn’t just as delicious as the kind you have to climb the tree for.

You remember Kinkade. Artistically, he was right up there with drunk clowns leaning on lamp posts, velvet Elvises enjoying pride of place above dirty chintz couches in double-wides, and any other scenic landscapes available at “quality retailers” like Walmart.

Kinkade is what you get when you add white nationalism with just a touch of church granny and then give it a paintbrush. He’s schmaltz, nostalgia, and Cheez-Whiz wrapped in bacon. He’s what happens when you let a teenager get knocked up in the bathroom of a Chick-fil-A. But he also happened to be one of the most successful painters of the 1990s and continues to sell millions of dollars worth of paintings today.

Why?

1. What Kinkade did was 100% representational. Americans like representational. What does that mean exactly? A house is immediately recognizable as a house. A tree is a tree. No boneless watch faces oozing down the side of a wall or mad priests howling inside geometric boxes. Just the calm reassurance of things you know, zero discomfort, and no abstruse “points” being made about social injustice or war or such other unpleasantness.

2. Kinkade understood the power of archetype. Buildings, especially houses, are powerful elicitors of emotion, and Kinkade trafficked almost exclusively in houses. They are the thatched or dormered dwellings of a non-existent, yearned-for past that only exists inside Rockwell paintings or Disney movies. No surprise then that during his lifetime, Kinkade managed to stroke a deal with Disney to help commemorate the anniversaries of their theme parks. There is something inherently appealing about a house whose windows (also archetypal) are flooded with light (Kinkade actually trademarked his moniker “Painter of Light”) and are positioned near a footpath without any people on it and then smothered in flowers.

3. Kinkade knew his audience. Supercilious culture vultures like Yours Truly here who disdain the obvious out of sheer principle? Not his audience. Simple white Christian folk who like assembly-line Jesuses and pastoral cottages? His audience. As a self-professed “born again,” Kinkade was smart enough to play to the house—the delicious irony of it was, he peaked too soon to take advantage of what would have been his real followers, namely the MAGA crowd. “We have found a way to bring to millions of people an art that they can understand,” he silkily informed a reporter, namely a world without war, poverty, racial injustice or indeed race.

4. Kinkade wasn’t an art snob. That’s not to say he didn’t resent other painters. He did. The guy had a long history of getting crazy-drunk and heckling artists and performers. At a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas, a very inebriated Mr. Kinkade shouted "Codpiece! Codpiece!" at the performers and had to be calmed down by his mommy. He once urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, blaring, “This one’s for you, Walt.”

Lest you think him nothing more than a dimpled, rakish prankster, read on.

I might find it easier to forgive Kinkade for his populist appeal if, like so many other white nationalist types, he didn’t openly screw investors. In 2009, an appeals court awarded $2.1 million in damages to Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchise owners who accused Kinkade of using terms like “partner,” “trust,” “Christian,” and “God” to falsely create a religious environment and “to instill a special relationship of trust.” Meanwhile, Kinkade sold his own paintings at a discount on the side, undercutting his own franchisees and lowering the value of his publicly traded company so he could buy it out himself. Never mind that he ruined his fellow-Christians in the process. Kinkade’s vast wealth signified that he was God’s chosen, and therefore above reproach.

A photo of Thomas Kinkade that in no way screams “Snake Oil!”

The apogee of Kinkade’s “brand” was surely achieved in 2002 when he decided to recreate his idyllic vision of an America that never was about thirty minutes northeast of San Francisco. He called it The Village at Hiddenbrooke with the same “e” that you might find on an artfully distressed sign bearing the words “Ye Olde Shoppe,” which it to say ten planned communities clumped together on 1,300 dry treeless acres. Instead of a useful town square in the middle, Kinkade opted for a golf course.

The brochure promised a "vision of simpler times," with "cottage-style homes that are filled with warmth and personality" and "garden-style landscaping with meandering pathways, benches, water features and secret places." What buyers got instead was a sprawl of charmless tract homes with satellite dishes and concrete patios. No signature stone fireplace with curlicues of smoke rising from the chimney. No delightful English garden with rose and clematis vines framing the windows. There were, however, four “aspirational” model homes to wander through: the Everett, the Chandler, the Merritt, and the Winsor, each named after Kinkade’s daughters, and those daughters named after famous artists.

As you might expect, one enormous Thomas Kinkade original hung on every wall.

How the developers kept from being sued for abuse of kitsch or false advertising or shameless pandering to white-flighters was to claim the development was “inspired by Thomas Kinkade.” He didn’t plan it himself; rather he “approved the plans.”

What’s sad is that Americans want and need community, not suburban sprawl. They need multi-use buildings like the kind we have here in Europe. They would benefit hugely from town squares. But zoning laws (which are a good thing—I’m not against zoning laws) make that an impossibility. Americans desperately require real change—not Thomas Kinkade’s gross form of Christian capitalism.

After Kinkade’s repeated arrests for drunk driving, it’s no surprise he died on April 6, 2012, at the age of 54, of acute alcohol-and-diazepam (Valium) intoxication. His long-suffering wife and daughters tried to make a case for “death by natural causes,” but there wasn’t much that could be called natural about the way he died.

Amy Pinto-Walsh, his girlfriend at the time (the Kinkades were separated), stated he’d been drinking the night before, but that “he died in his sleep, very happy, in the house he built, with the paintings he loved, and the woman he loved.”

Mugshot of the accused, equal parts Jack Nicholson and syphilitic leprechaun.

That last part about “the woman he loved” ended, as you might imagine, in a massive lawsuit involving the deceased’s ex-wife. There were accusations of home break-ins, estate-appointed security guards, and the girlfriend being forced to pay $11,000 a month to stay in his mansion. Nothing like watching survivors pick over the entrails, is there?

Amy Pinto-Walsh, flanked by her lawyers, as she emerged from court. For some reason, I am brought to mind of another adorable “antic” of Kinkade’s, which was when he grabbed women’s breasts at a few of his own functions and shouted, “These are great tits!”

“God is my art agent,” Kinkade once exclaimed. I’m sure his thousands of Instagram followers still agree. Like Trump, Kinkade was Teflon—nothing he did or said could dissuade his followers from adoring him, even after learning that an army of underpaid staffers did most of the brushwork for Kinkade’s maudlin little trifles.

Meanwhile, every legit artist I know continues to toil in poverty, obscurity, or both.

Perhaps Thomas Kinkade’s real crime was to commit massive atrocities against art?

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

I know art is subjective. Maybe you like Kinkade. That’s perfectly okay. I may have an opinion, but I do not have the market cornered on impeccable taste. Feel free to weigh in here. I want to hear what you think.