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1:16am June 19, 2012

➸ Not glad he's dead, but his paintings always creeped me out...

feliscorvus:

Like the title says, this definitely isn’t one of those “I didn’t like [some aspect(s) of] this person so I’m glad they’re dead!” posts. I can’t ever get behind that sort of thing, it just seems needlessly mean-spirited and slightly WTF.

That said…I have to admit I’m not especially shocked that Thomas Kinkade died the way he did (drug/alcohol overdose). There was something very, very…wrong about his paintings. They were superficially very pretty and the guy obviously had some level of technical skill. But I could never stand to actually look at any of his stuff for very long.

Something about it just felt weirdly..overbearing. Like I was stuck in a freezing elevator with a group of fundamentalists who were really sweaty and wearing too much perfume. It was like a bright shiny fast-moving zig-zaggy distraction on top of something festering and rotten. And I’m not even talking about the sketchy business practices this guy was supposedly involved in, I’m talking about something that goes a lot deeper. The kind of thing that, if not stopped, will eventually eat your insides (figuratively speaking) while leaving the surface untouched. 

I got that sense from his paintings too. Apparently he wasn’t actually all that technically skilled, either – I mean somewhat, but a lot of artists I know have commented on things that show he really didn’t know what he was doing, and then tried to cover it up by strategic placing of objects in his painting. But yeah there was something about them that wasn’t even art, and I don’t mean that in a snobby way, I mean that in an “ewwwww, this was painted to manipulate people and to hide something seriously sinister, not because of any kind of artistic impulse” way.

And I just was reading the Wikipedia article on him, and found this quote by Joan Didion:

A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

So apparently other people picked up on it hiding something sinister. Which is something, considering how oblivious a lot of people are. Wikipedia then says (of the same person who said that):

Didion goes on to compare the “Kinkade Glow” to the luminism of 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt, who sentimentalized the infamous Donner Pass in his Donner Lake from the Summit.[19] Didion sees “unsettling similarities” between the two painters, and worries that Kinkade’s own treatment of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, The Mountains Declare His Glory, similarly ignores the tragedy of the forced dispersal of Yosemite’s Sierra Miwok Indians during the Gold Rush, by including an imaginary Miwok camp as what he calls “an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God’s glory.”

Anyone who could talk about someone romanticizing Donner Pass in the same breath as Kinkade… really gets what I find creepy as hell about his paintings.

And yeah – I’m not surprised about it being substance abuse either. Wikipedia says this about that:

The Los Angeles Times has reported that some of Kinkade’s former colleagues, employees, and even collectors of his work say that he had a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers. The Times further reported that he openly groped a woman’s breasts at a South Bend, Indiana sales event, and mentioned his proclivity for ritual territory marking through urination, once relieving himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.”[33][34] In a letter to licensed gallery owners acknowledging he may have behaved badly during a stressful time when he overindulged in food and drink, Kinkade said accounts of the alcohol-related incidents included “exaggerated, and in some cases outright fabricated personal accusations.” The letter did not address any incident specifically.[34]

In 2006, John Dandois, Media Arts Group executive, recounted a story that on one occasion (“about six years ago”) Kinkade became drunk at a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas and began shouting “Codpiece! Codpiece!” at the performers. Eventually he was calmed by his mother.[33] Dandois also said of Kinkade, “Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn’t tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cursing and doing a lot of weird stuff like touching himself.”[33] In June 2010, Kinkade was arrested in Carmel, California for driving while under the influence of alcohol. He was convicted.[35][36][8]

I’m not cheering that he’s dead either. But I really, really hope that he doesn’t undergo that weird transformation other people go through when they’re dead. Where, as George in “Dead Like Me” puts it, “You can be the biggest turd in the toilet bowl and still come out smelling like a rose.” That transformation really bugs me and freaks me out with the reality-warpage that always ensues.