Dali House

Hate to get snobby, but I seriously doubt that the Art Renewal Centre would ever rise to the defence of Thomas Kinkade as one its beloved “modern masters”, but there’s certainly nothing appealing about an artist’s official website that has “shopping cart” at the top of it and flogs baseball caps with the artist’s name across the front.
Kinkade claims to be “America’s most collected living artist”, and there’s no question that his style of “inspirational” art — see “Living Waters” above — sells very big indeed in the USA heartland. The Californian is proud of his Christian devoutability and even prouder of using “his gift as a vehicle to communicate and spread inherent life-affirming values”. He is, he boasts, the “Painter of Light” — not JMW Turner, as others might argue.
But lo, there was dissension in the land, and the Los Angeles Times begs to differ as to Kinkade’s “lightness”, reporting earlier this month that he’s been “accused of ruthless tactics and seamy personal conduct”. Here’s part of the article; read the whole thing here.

“When I got saved, God became my art agent,” he said in a 2004 video biography, genteel in tone and rich in the themes of faith and family values that have helped win him legions of fans, albeit few among art critics.
But some former Kinkade employees, gallery operators and others contend that the Painter of Light has a decidedly dark side.
In litigation and interviews with the Los Angeles Times, some former gallery owners depict Kinkade, 48, as a ruthless businessman who drove them to financial ruin at the same time he was fattening his business associates’ bank accounts and feathering his nest with tens of millions of dollars.
Kinkade denies these allegations.
Last month, however, a three-member panel of the American Arbitration Association ordered his company to pay $860,000 for defrauding the former owners of two failed Virginia galleries. That decision marks the first major legal setback for Kinkade, who won three previous arbitration claims. Five more are pending.
It’s not just Kinkade’s business practices that have been called into question. Former gallery owners, ex-employees and others say his personal behaviour 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, Indiana.
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 …
Kinkade, a self-described product of a broken home and a hardscrabble childhood, once worked as a film animator and hawked his paintings at supermarket parking lots in his hometown of Placerville, California. His climb to fame began two decades ago, when he and his wife spent their life savings to start making his prints.
Since then, Kinkade has spun a hugely lucrative career from his distinctly romantic, idealised images of street scenes, lighthouses, country cottages and landscapes. It is a world without sharp edges, all warm and fuzzily aglow with setting suns and streetlights and luminescent windows.
Critics have described Kinkade’s works — with titles such as “Sunset on Lamplight Lane” and “The Garden of Prayer” — as little more than mass-produced kitsch. But that has not deterred the multitudes who pay from a few hundred dollars for paper prints to $10,000 or more for canvas editions he has signed and retouched.
“It’s mainstream art, not art you have to look at to try to understand, or have an art degree to know whether it’s good or not,” said Mike Koligman, a long-time fan who with his wife owns Kinkade galleries in San Diego and Utah.
Karen de la Carriere feels the same way. Framed Kinkades fill her living room walls and have transformed a long hallway into a veritable gauntlet of glowing lithographs. Kinkade’s art is both a personal passion and a business for the Los Angeles resident, who deals in the resale market for Kinkades, selling more than $25,000 of his works each month on eBay and her website.
“This is God-given talent,” she said of a favoured print, “Sierra Evening Majesty”, with its snowy peaks, red-gold skies and smoke wisping from a cabin chimney. “He is a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci or Monet. There is no one in our generation who can paint like that.”
Nor many who make the money he does.
From 1997 through May 2005, Kinkade reaped more than $50 million in royalties from his prints and licensed product lines, according to testimony in the recently decided arbitration case. His images adorn air fresheners, night lights, teddy bears, toys, tote bags, pillows, umbrellas and La-Z-Boy loungers, which one retailer’s ad describes as “something not merely to be acquired, but collected — like fine art itself.”