The L.A. Times has an amusing piece on Thomas Kincade, the “Painter of Light” whose hackey canvases and prints you’ve no doubt seen in your local mall.
The nut of the story is that Kincade is being sued by more than a half a dozen gallery owners and former associates who accuse him of swindling them out of millions of dollars.
But the best bit is the recounting of testimony and some of the interviews from some close to Kincade. They paint a picture of Kincaid, a born again Christian who claims God guides his paint brush, as a drunken asshole who likes to grope strangers and piss on children’s cartoon characters.
From the story:
It’s not just Kinkade’s business practices that have been called into question. Former gallery owners, ex-employees and others say his personal behavior also belies the wholesome image on which he’s built his empire.
In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee’s wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman’s breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.
And then there is Kinkade’s proclivity for “ritual territory marking,” as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.
“This one’s for you, Walt,” the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade’s company, in an interview.
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Full story here.
5 Comments
March 5, 2006 at 10:48 pm
Kinkade is… yeah. I don’t like Kinkade.
Yet not exactly for the same reasons most “artists” do, per usual.
March 5, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Don’t get me started on the many, many reasons I don’t like Thomas Kinkade. Gretchen feels much the same way.
February 27, 2008 at 6:44 pm
I would like to know if there is anything anywhere that says he ever painted signing a different name?
February 27, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I own a painting that is better than a Kinkade. Not as done up for mass production, since it is an original. I’ve seen other paintings “of light” that are before his time, also. I consider him a copier of other’s artistic accomplishments. Not such a bad thing, unless it is him selling and selling and selling as his own grand ideas. He has made millions copying a Christian, and badly apparently, and in my opinion, simply copying art already done by others and then having the resources to extremely mass market it, and that being on the “Christian” title getting him attention. I also wonder what he does with all of that money. Just a personal observation on the claims of “devout Christianity”. The painting I have is dated 1970 and is superior in talent but with exactness in style. It totally reminds me of the Cabbage Patch Dolls, what he does.
June 6, 2009 at 5:00 am
WOWW It is a good thing for me. Thanks. ^_^